1 Basic Problems in School Design in China
When solving these problems, how should we know the future school education space?
When designing a good school, what kind of innovative thinking should we have to better serve the school design?
Here are some classroom drawings. It can be seen that we are familiar with these schools, and the classroom layout and educational model of the school on the left nearly 100 years ago have not changed much today. Today's classrooms are not essentially different from today's classrooms except for the introduction of modern projectors, electronic whiteboards and other equipment. In fact, today's talent training objectives, school teaching philosophy, classroom teaching mode and students' specific learning methods all include behind-the-scenes technology.
Many changes have taken place in the supporting conditions. But why hasn't the layout of the classroom, or teaching space, changed much? Doesn't the school need to change? What is the reason for not changing? There are many problems worthy of our in-depth discussion.
Personally, I think there are many reasons why domestic schools have not changed much today. Compared with foreign schools, especially the United States, Britain and Japan after World War II, the school building space in these countries has undergone great changes. I attended a school construction meeting in Beijing a month ago. Some scholars from developed countries shared their thoughts on the design of school space in their own countries, and obviously felt that the educational space in other countries was very different from ours.
Whether in the United States or Japan, their school design emphasizes the plane layout inside a building and the specific teaching function of each space. Domestic architectural facts focus on the building facade and overall layout. Personally, I think there is a great difference between them, and there may be a supporting theoretical basis behind this difference. This phenomenon may be related to the ideas and behaviors of many people at different levels in China, such as design circles, education circles and school infrastructure circles. Personally, I think this is not a single phenomenon, but a group of collective knowledge. This kind of insight, if compared with the major developed countries in the west, can see the differences and differences in their concepts, as well as the distance between China and foreign countries. We can try to explore why China has such problems from several aspects.
Human factors lead to unreasonable school construction.
There may be many reasons for the existence of school construction in China today. One of the reasons, personally, is caused by human factors, such as venue problems. A large proportion of schools are not suitable for building schools when planning site selection. For example, schools are often built on earthquake fault zones and toxic sites.
The picture on the right shows a junior high school somewhere, where there is an economic development zone. When planning the economic development zone, both related enterprises and related schools are planned locally. However, a few years after the school was built, two polluting enterprises were introduced into this economic development zone. The two companies have a common feature, that is, they need to emit exhaust gas every 12 hour. These gases have a strong pungent smell, which directly leads to the failure of normal teaching in the waste gas emission stage.
Besides these, there may be some other problems. If the index setting is unscientific.
Case: I once took over the design of a kindergarten, 12 class, which occupied a small area. Then the relevant indicators given by the government such as plot ratio, building density, green space and building height should not exceed 1.0, 25% and 35% respectively. According to the calculation of class size, I found that a very harsh situation is that a kindergarten needs to deduct 25% of the building density index, and then build the kindergarten into four floors to meet the relevant building index requirements.
In domestic building codes, it is required that kindergarten buildings should not exceed three floors. How to use the fourth floor? Obviously, it can't be used as an ordinary classroom, but it can only be used as some auxiliary rooms, but the layout of the auxiliary rooms in the above picture is very unreasonable, which has caused great conflicts.
I tried to solve this problem. For example, can kindergarten design introduce a new design structure, such as loft structure, to solve this difficulty? One advantage of this structure is that it can better solve the problem of insufficient building area under the same building height, because it can solve the space problem of teachers working in the attic. However, after adopting this structure, it is difficult to design a three-story loft structure with a building height of15m. It would be better if it is16m, but the local planning bureau stipulates that the building height should not exceed15m.
For school land, there is no good implementation of a key policy: education gives priority to development. In the early 1990s, China put forward the theory of giving priority to the development of education at the level of national policy, which holds that the development of education should be put in front of the macroeconomic development, including giving priority to ensuring the investment related to education, and giving priority to school planning in the planning of economic zones, including urban planning. But the reality is that most of the land for primary and secondary schools is marginal, and the best land is rarely given to education. As a result, there may be many unreasonable problems in the location of schools.
Insufficient or insufficient investment and external choice: most public schools in China are generally under-invested. The investment of the school basically stays within the framework of the school area twenty or thirty years ago, and then the total investment of the school is multiplied by the infrastructure fund standard (per square meter 1600 or 1800) according to the framework base.
There are two problems with this method. 1: The area regulation is too dead, and the flexibility of school space, construction land or construction house is not considered in place. 2. The unit cost per square meter is relatively dead, and many school buildings need to be done well, not only the design and funds of rough houses, but also the school culture and interior design, but they are often shelved because of insufficient funds. Therefore, the total investment may be generally insufficient.
He is often invited as a bid evaluation expert to help Party A evaluate the design of the school, and also participated in some bidding designs of the school. In these experiences, we can often see that sometimes some bid evaluation experts invited by Party A tend to be pseudo-experts when evaluating school architectural design. The so-called pseudo-expert means that he has a certain architectural background, but he often doesn't know much about the field of school design, so some experts often judge school buildings according to their past experience and understanding of architecture, which often leads to some gaps in the final selection results.
A big problem in the bid evaluation process is that real users, such as schools and teachers, rarely participate in the bid evaluation process, which leads to the fact that some practical use needs of Party A or users often cannot be reasonably expressed in the bid evaluation scheme.
In school design, the bigger problem is the domestic design ability.
This problem is also a big problem that needs to be solved urgently in school design. School design is a very complicated matter, not simple. It shows how to express teaching needs reasonably in space. Churchill had a saying: We shaped architecture, and architecture in turn influenced us. Some schools are well designed, which can reflect the function of education well and have a great influence on teaching improvement. But the problem is that at present, the understanding and cognition of the promotion and promotion of school space to education and teaching are not in place, the expression of reasonable educational ideas in the design of educational space is not in place, and the designers' understanding of school space, educational space and teaching needs is not in place.
From a simple or simple basic cognition, we may feel that there is a lack of good communication between domestic education and school design, which makes many problems in school design.
On the other hand, it is not worthless for these architects and designers to discuss how to design school buildings from their perspective, but it is also very valuable. Only by strengthening education and combining professional knowledge of architecture from the perspective of education can we get better results.
Through school design, combining the power of architecture and pedagogy, and having a good exchange and dialogue on this issue, domestic school design may be better in the future. Looking at this problem from the comparison of foreign countries, because I have read a lot of foreign literature, and when I look at some theories about school construction abroad, I will suddenly find that many foreign theoretical scholars are not from architectural design schools or architectural design, but many are from pedagogy and architecture, but in China, these are really few.
In the United States, for example, many education professors study school design at San Diego State University, Georgia State University and Chengchi University in Taiwan Province Province. However, no matter in normal universities or comprehensive universities in China, few scholars pay attention to this issue. At present, in education, what we need to reflect on is that the power of interdisciplinary discussion on architectural issues in education is not strong enough and the theoretical foundation is not solid enough.
How do we design a good school according to the current situation in China?
If any school does school design with great care, there must be many ideas behind it, and many needs are expressed through space design. What kind of school we build not only reflects the actual material and technical conditions, but also reflects our inherited educational ideas. The core of design should be to express what kind of school teaching concept and create future learning space under the premise of integrating contemporary science and technology. The design of a school is to construct the unique educational problems of this school.
A month ago, I met a Japanese professor: Takeshi Nagasawa. He has published a very influential monograph in the field of school architecture in China. He shared a view with me that architecture is based on land, while building schools is based on ideas.
I personally agree with you very much. Many other buildings, such as residential buildings, commercial areas and office buildings, only need to stand on the land and make the construction area, and many facilities and functions can be optimized one after another in the future. But school construction is not. The school has special needs from the beginning and needs to do a lot of overall planning in advance. There are many concepts behind it, such as education concept, students' learning concept, curriculum concept, teaching technology concept and so on. So schools are really based on concepts.
When the educational idea is based on school construction, it involves another question: what kind of idea does school construction need? Every school has different ideas, but on the macro level, they all have some * * * identities. I have some opinions to share with you on this issue.
Can spreading yesterday's knowledge in today's class solve tomorrow's problems?
This problem is worth studying. Can our children really solve tomorrow's problems with yesterday's knowledge? Personally, I think tomorrow's problems still need future technology to solve. The future generation will use undiscovered technology to solve the upcoming problems. For future children, the future is uncertain and full of challenges. For today's students, the key is not how much knowledge they have mastered, but the ability to find, analyze and creatively solve problems. Generally speaking, students' learning ability is becoming more and more important.
Nowadays, in the planning and construction of learning space, we should change from how to instill and spread knowledge better to how to pay attention to the cultivation of students' learning ability. How to cultivate students' ability to find, analyze and solve problems with reasonable space design?
I have four new ideas to share with you.
Re-recognize students.
Nowadays, with the development of network technology, their learning has the characteristics of emphasizing experience, communication and relying on the network. These characteristics are very different from traditional education in educational theory and educational space, including educational infrastructure.
Get to know the teacher again.
Teachers have always been the agitators, disseminators and leaders of teaching, but in fact, the role of teachers will change to some extent in the future. A scholar from Beijing Normal University did a study. How will the role of teachers change in 2030? It is suggested that the proportion of tutors should be increased from the current 20% to 30% to 73%. From the traditional dimension of teachers imparting knowledge, it will drop from today's 80% to 19%. In this respect, the role of teachers has changed greatly, and more teachers have become students' learning tutors.
Teachers become the leaders and promoters of students' learning, and the evaluation of teachers' teaching ability has gradually changed from how to teach to how to help students learn. Such an important change means that the theme of the class is slowly returning to the students. Teachers in education are more about activating students' desire for learning, making them take the initiative to learn, explore the world and build their own knowledge. This leads to great differences in the spatial planning of a series of learning resources, such as classroom setting, desk and chair layout.
Re-recognize learning.
Many designers think that school space is a laboratory and a library except ordinary classrooms, and there is no other way to learn. Actually, it's not like this. Great changes have taken place in today's education and teaching mode and teaching concept. More and more emphasis is placed on students' independent exploration ability, their soft power, communication, cooperation and creative thinking. In this process, students' learning styles are very different from the past, such as group, resource, theme and project, which all put forward new demands for learning space and need to be considered in the early school space planning.
Re-recognize the school.
School space is a combination of formal learning space, informal learning space and mixed space, including dialogue and communication, rather than a single type. In the past, the school was divided into teaching area, sports area and logistics living area. Now, from the perspective of learning space, how to construct the collocation of learning space to meet different needs is becoming more and more important. New thinking on building a beautiful school School design is not only a matter for designers, but also a multi-disciplinary and multi-field problem. School space needs to pay more and more attention to the problems of more disciplines and listen to the demands of different stakeholders. In this regard, I put forward several issues that need to be discussed. After the school design has a design plan, should we find a designer immediately? I personally don't think so. Because of this kind of thinking, what kind of school do we need, how do we construct the space belonging to this school, we need to think more about this school's unique thinking, unique positioning and unique educational concept, and we need more exchanges. It is very important to think about educational thought, educational concept and orientation in the early stage. In school design, what ideas and needs does the school have before design planning and project establishment? Before Party A issues the architectural task book, we need to seriously consider these issues and put forward new requirements for the school space design. When I was designing a middle school in Hangzhou, we spent two months exploring the concept of this school and came to the conclusion that this school needs STEM space. When the design was completed, it really created a unique education and teaching place. The school will be completed in September next year. Although the land for school design and planning is very tight, it is still meaningful to spend 5,000 square meters to build such a STEM space and plan various STEM education and communication spaces. It will also promote the cultivation of students' ability and the formation of interdisciplinary and creative thinking in the future.
This kind of design technology and concept is used to do some research and conceptual design for any school in the early stage of design, which is increasingly recognized by various places, and more and more schools adopt this model to promote projects.
Does school design only refer to architectural design?
School design is very complicated, not only refers to architectural design, including conceptual design, architectural and interior design, campus cultural design, special design for mentally handicapped people, and maybe there will be more designs later, but at present, school design is not only refers to architectural design.
Unfortunately, some education bureaus and Party A still stay in architectural design when designing schools. They need to change their traditional ideas and pay more attention to indoor and campus culture and weak current intelligent design, which can help them create better campus construction solutions.
Specifications are very important and guide our design, but they bring many restrictions in actual design. Nowadays, people pay more and more attention to how to look at and surpass norms.
How to consider the actual needs of education and teaching more on the basis of observing the norms? To solve this problem, we should also change our thinking from standard-based thinking to demand-based thinking. In school space planning and design, if we can reasonably explain the created space and campus concept from the perspective of demand and pedagogy psychology, then there will be a good theoretical basis and demand support, and the design will become reasonable. Nowadays, many school spaces have no reasonable explanation why they should do this.
How to innovate design in a wider range?
In the future, designers should pay attention to the research of educational technology, educational furniture and equipment, such as desks and chairs with group cooperation function, tapestry theme walls that are more conducive to teachers and students to display and exchange learning results. Taking tapestry as an example, it has many advantages such as better display, sound absorption, beauty and convenience.