Flexibility and Design

Learning from the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) Project

Joshua D. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351400879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book questions flexibility as a design approach by providing a longitudinal analysis of an innovative architectural experiment called the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) project. The SCSD pioneered the use of performance specifications to create an open, prefabricated, and integrated system of building components that provided four modes of flexibility. Educational facilities throughout California used the SCSD system and it spawned a variety of similar projects throughout North America. This book traces the development and subsequent use of the system over 50 years through archival research, personal observations, re-photography, re-surveying, plan evaluations, interviews, and an advertisement analysis. These new findings provide useful insights for architects, educators, historic preservationists, and others about the affordances of spatial flexibility, the difficulties associated with technological transfer, the impact of unstable market conditions, the importance of user input during the planning process, and the need for long-term social relations to sustain architectural experiments.

1 The Problem of Change

Is spatial flexibility a useful strategy for making buildings more sustainable? This book provides a highly nuanced answer to this seemingly straightforward question by exploring the complex network of intentions that catalyzed the reification of a particular construction technology, the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) project, and its longitudinal reception over time in relation to its shifting context.

I have studied the issue of spatial flexibility for several years at a comfortable professional and academic distance, but the need for flexible schools became personal when our family went to register our second child for kindergarten at our neighborhood public school. For three years our daughter had walked with us every day in sun, rain, and snow to drop off her big brother at a lovely three-story, recently renovated brick building constructed in the 1920s. The day she went to officially register she wore her best clothes and biggest smile. The central enrollment office was bustling with parents and kids and after a short wait in line the clerk asked for our address, which we promptly supplied. After a few mouse clicks the clerk announced, “I’m sorry, but your daughter has been displaced to another school. She’s 11th on the waitlist.” “Displaced?! How can that be?” we implored. We live two blocks from the school and her brother already attends there. We were all crushed and confused.

We quickly reached out to the other parents of other displaced children via social media to form a group to attend upcoming school board meetings and to write letters to the superintendent, school board members, and local politicians with a list of potential short-term options and actions the school could take—reconfirm all primary home addresses, conduct an immediate space assessment of the school for potential redistribution, provide increased capacity in oversized classrooms via additional teaching aides, leasing nearby vacant storefronts, and/or adding portable buildings to replace the recently razed six-classroom building that had served as overflow space for decades at the school. In the long-term we suggested that the school district consider expanding the building permanently or redraw the school boundary maps. Beyond the inconvenience to parents, we argued that this shortsighted policy of displacement threatened to destabilize city neighborhoods that had recently begun to reverse the decades-long trend of suburban flight for families with school-aged children. Fortunately, after several weeks of negotiating, the district devised another alternative—a nearby lottery school added another kindergarten and 15 kids at our school who had been on the waitlist there were invited to voluntarily change schools, which most did. This opened up space at our school and we now walk there every day with both kids. Unfortunately, this solution is only a temporary stopgap as more families continue to pour into the neighborhood each year without a long-term plan for expanding the school.

This personal anecdote highlights the fact that flexibility of schools is a perpetual concern for school administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Population shifts, however, are only one of the many forces that impact schools—pedagogical shifts, building code and other public policy changes, funding issues, the ever-increasing rate of technological change, and a host of other factors all contribute. My story also highlights that there are many social and technological options to resolve these kinds of issues.

The case study that follows provides a lengthy analysis of an architectural experiment of the 1960s that took an alternative approach—to create school facilities with a high degree of spatial flexibility capable of adapting over time. After 50 years of field trials, the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) project has many lessons to teach about the importance of creating robust sociotechnical solutions to sustainably manage the built environment.¹

Categories of Change

I previously developed a framework of various categories of change explicitly stated in architectural publications and labeled these as social, economic, environmental, technical, aesthetic, and cultural forces of change.² Each of these categories discussed in turn below was constructed from the dominant conditions in these texts, but should not be understood as pure and distinct from the others as they often work in series, in parallel, or even in a complex network.

Social Change

Social changes are those linked to various categories of interpersonal relations, which occur at various scales of interaction (micro, exo, and macro). At the microsystem level of social change there are shifts in household composition (i.e. marriage, divorce, children being born, children leaving home, caring for elder family members, etc.) and changes in household circumstances (i.e. household income flux, changes in physical ability due to aging, disease, or accidents) as well as changes in preference, like the switch from cellular floor plans to open plans. Social change also occurs at the exosystem level. For example, corporate organizational value shifts towards greater equity in the workplace have radically transformed offices from hierarchical arrangements to open offices. Larger changes at the macrosystem level include such forces as war, national and global cultural shifts, and demographic fluctuations. At the macrosystem level, demographers have highlighted the relatively high annual mobility rate in the United States with nearly 35 million Americans moving from one residence to another per year.³ People move for a combination of microsystem, exosystem, and macrosystem reasons, but many are directly linked to economic change.

Economic Change

Just as social change occurs at many scales, so does economic change. Building up from the individual through the organizational scale and down from the national scale, economic change incessantly impacts what and how we build. Speculative development, the dominant mode of building production in the US, tends towards generic spaces designed for abstract users rather than specific persons, communities, or sites. As such, most projects can be understood as the built expression of the expected ownership longevity and the potential return on investment that the building will allow. To maximize profits, building owners and their design professionals have devised innumerable strategies for mitigating the instability of initial costs of professional fees, financing, and construction (material, labor, and shipping costs); as well as operating costs associated with attracting customers, improving worker productivity, addressing frequent staff turnover and reorganization, and lowering utility bills. Of course one of the major variables that impact energy costs are changes in the environment.

Environmental Change

As with the other forms of change, environmental change also occurs at various scales. The most obvious is weather and climate. Local weather conditions are always dynamic. At the individual building level, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, daylight availability, and precipitation are in constant flux and directly affect energy performance and inhabitant comfort. Unfortunately architects and engineers increasingly designed buildings to resist these natural flows during the 20^th Century.⁴ However, there has been a growing number of projects⁵ over the past two decades that feature manually operated and computer-controlled technics⁶ to account for changing weather conditions.

Changes to buildings on adjacent sites can also provoke architectural change. The alteration and/or demolition of adjacent buildings can alter the microclimate around the building by changing wind patterns, increasing or decreasing shading and views, modifying precipitation runoff flows, and in dense, urban environments increase or decrease thermal exposure of exterior walls. In addition to these physical changes, modifications to surrounding properties can dramatically impact the psychological perception of the area, which can impact the social and economic valuation of each building. One recent example of such unanticipated changes involves the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, which has a glass roof shielded with site-specific shading devices to allow an ideal amount of indirect light into the building. Shortly after the Nasher’s completion, a large condominium building went up across the street. Not only did the condominium’s height interfere with the previously unobstructed view of the sky needed for an art installation by James Turrell, but it was also clad in highly reflective glass. Sunlight bounces off this building with such intensity that it has radically altered the art-viewing experience and is actually causing damage to the artwork and the surrounding landscape.⁷

At a much larger scale, climate change has also become an increasingly important force of change for the built environment. Sea-level rise, and increased numbers of extreme events such as heat waves, floods, and wildfires present a few potentially catastrophic possibilities.⁸ Less severe consequences such as higher energy bills and new behavioral patterns can also be linked to climate change.⁹ A new breed of voluntary building standards and rating systems has emerged over the past twenty years (e.g. LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE, CalGreen, and the International Green Construction Code) in response to shifting environmental conditions, but these generally fail to address how to plan for changes in technology over time.

Technical Change

Scholars from the fields of Philosophy of Technology, History of Technology, Science Studies, and Science and Technology Studies have long debated the degree to which technology is “a key governing force in society.”¹⁰ On one end of the debate are the “hard technological determinists” like Karl Marx who claimed “agency (the power to effect change) is imputed to technology itself,”¹¹ even to the degree that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”¹² At the other extreme pole, social determinists assign primary agency to social forces over technological.¹³ In between these poles is the “softer” technological determinist¹⁴ perspective that still grants significant power to technology, but recognizes the mediating influences of social embrace, acquiescence, or rejection of technologies.

No matter where one falls on this spectrum, technical changes lead to a great number of challenges in designing and maintaining buildings. One clear example is the introduction of information technologies and the successive replacement of one type by another (i.e. Ethernet replaced by 10BaseT then by CAT-1, CAT-2, CAT-3, CAT-4, and CAT-5, now all made obsolete by high capacity Wi-Fi). Other examples include the addition of electricity,¹⁵ air conditioning,¹⁶ structural steel, and elevators.¹⁷

Another critical force of change—aesthetic change—must also be considered.

Aesthetic Change

Aesthetic change in the architectural literature includes sensory, communicative, and wondrous effects. Sensory effects are caused by biophysical responses to shifts in lighting, color, sound, taste, smell, and form.¹⁸ Communicative effects are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Problem of Change
• 2 Flexible Schools and the SCSD
• 3 The SCSD Revisited
• 4 Post-SCSD Flexible Learning Environments
• 5 From Flexible Hybrids to Protean Systems
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index