Triumph of Central Planning

One of my clients is a large urban school district. About 30 years ago some bureaucrat came up with the clever idea of designing one prototype elementary school and repeating it 20-some times all over town. It would be a great way to save on design and construction costs. There were two problems with this approach.

The first is that no design is perfect, and instead of learning from their mistakes once, they repeated the same problem almost 2 dozen times before figuring it out. For example, putting the boiler room in the center of the second floor to make equipment replacement almost impossible. Also, they placed the intake vents right next to the exhaust vents so that the old stale air got sucked right back into the building. ...And don't get me started on the roof.

The other, even bigger problem is that a design that works well on a theoretical flat site with all the classrooms facing north and east, and the entrance facing south may not work so well when put on a north-facing slope so that water pours in through the doors on the uphill side, and turned so that the classroom windows roast in the hot afternoon sun, and the shaded entrance turns into a skating rink in January.

I've been hired to help remedy these problems.

The British have taken this model of central planning to an even greater level.

The UK’s Building Schools for the Future programme (BSF) aims to rebuild every secondary school in England by 2020 at a cost of £45bn.

Unfortunately, these new buildings are showing problems with narrow corridors, too few toilets and inadequate ventilation. The Department for Education and Skills responded with several "exemplar school designs" to be used as a basis for bidding.

However, Sunand Prasad, President Elect of the RIBA spoke exclusively to WAN and believes that that these issues have not been resolved, "Many problems with the roll-out the BSF programme stem from there being no budget for concepts and design at the early stages of the project cycle. It is vital that some preliminary design and consultation is carried out before the project moves into the competitive stage to avoid these kind of situations."

You may call it penny wise and pound foolish. I call it job security.