Design 2147 CEO Sisto Martello recently chatted with Rob Rogers, FAIA, Founding Principal of Rogers Partners, about designing for schools in New York City. Below is a summary of the conversation. You can also listen to the complete conversation in Episode 126 of Sisto Says.
Q: What kinds of education projects does Rogers Partners take on, and how do they differ from one another?
A: The education projects we do really form a diverse collection. We’ve done childcare for the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA), but we have a staunch group of work for the independent schools in and around the New York City area and district. We’ve done a bunch of charter schools. They behave differently; the architecture is the bones of the pedagogy. Whatever a school is in its character, and its essence and how it wants to operate, that comes out spatially and materially and circulation systems.
Q: How much does a client’s decision-making style shape a project?
A: Each institution has its own character, really almost like an individual. They all make decisions differently. Sometimes it’s a very powerful head or head of board, and it’s almost like working in a corporate environment. Other times it’s very democratic or hierarchical. That’s one of the first things you need to understand: how does this organization make decisions? Because that’s our job, to bring them things to make decisions about.
Q: How have school buildings changed over the last 30 or 40 years?
A: We’ve worked with a number of our clients for 15 years or more, in some cases, because schools evolve. They grow. They develop new programs, new directions. The buildings that were right 30 and 40 years ago have really changed, both in terms of the academics for specialized spaces, but also the athletic capacity.
Q: What makes athletic facilities so difficult to build in Manhattan schools?
A: You want to occupy the roof, and sometimes neighbors have opinions about playgrounds on the roof. Like the athletic centers. We did one on the Upper East Side that’s completely around athletics, a major court with all the regulations and 500 spectators. Where can you find that in Manhattan? It has a whole bunch of squash courts. The challenge is trying to get those very specifically sized spaces into the zoning boundaries. A lot of times, we’ll end up at the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA). The BSA is pretty good at understanding that a school is not the same as a developer. The school delivers programmatic needs for kids. We’re about to start another athletic center on the Upper East Side. In this case, one of the current issues is that they have such limited access to Randall’s Island. The demands on that space are so competitive that to actually get physical exercise as part of a curriculum is a real challenge.
Q: What are the logistics of building a school in New York City really like?
A: It’s pure logistics in the sense that, at the same time we were building this athletic center on the Upper East Side, we were building a brand-new building for Rice University in Houston. We had four-sides access, laid down space, and we were over in the Upper East Side with a condo under construction across the street. You couldn’t close a lane. And you have 120-foot-long steel trusses coming into the city.
Schools are active and often in session. Some schools have slightly different policies regarding construction and students, but, for example, we’ve worked with one school for about 15 years, and no construction worker has ever been in the same space as a student. That’s the school’s practice. So the question becomes, how do you phase the project? Who’s where, when, how long are construction crews there?
Q: How does designing for private schools compare with designing for public and charter schools?
A: You do get some flexibility with private schools. Charters tend to be stricter. They’re on a schedule similar to that of public schools: much tighter budgets, a little less flexibility programmatically.
Q: Why are schools such a major part of your practice?
A: One of the main reasons that schools are a major component of our practice is the impact they have. Architects come to the firm because they want to work on schools and institutions. They want mission-driven work that’s satisfying.
Q: Can you share a project that shows that impact?
A: I have a great story. We did a K-8 school in Baltimore in connection with Johns Hopkins University. It was a really creative project run by their Graduate School of Education, and the dean was actually our client. It was very pedagogically innovative. The dean wanted to spatially break down the idea of one teacher and 30 students. He was also concerned about the behaviors that can happen in a traditional space. He said, “You tell me one good thing that’s ever happened in a cafeteria.” It was a fantastic thing in this great school in a challenging neighborhood of East Baltimore. Nothing in the building is “fancy,” no fancy materials of any kind, but there’s a generosity of light and space. I was down there when it opened, and this third-grade student who’d been going to school in the local school that had trailers on the parking lot and out in the playground, he walked in and goes, “Is this for me?” That’s why I’m an architect, because you can make that kind of impact.
Q: What advice would you give people entering the profession?
A: I’ll be cautious with your audience, but I’ve often said, architecture is a really beautiful profession, but it’s kind of a mediocre business. Make sure that you’re doing something that feeds the passionate part.
Q: Your firm also designed a Boys & Girls Club. How did architecture help solve a real problem there?
A: It’s a lot like a school, the Boys & Girls Club we did up on Broadhurst, by the viaduct and the polo grounds. It’s hugely impactful on the community.
This one in particular was interesting because that group ran four other Boys & Girls Clubs, and this was their first ground-up construction in years. When we were doing our early programmatic research, one of the things that came out is that they struggled with teen retention. As kids hit 13, 14, 15, there were other attractions. So we said, “Well, that’s what architecture is for, to make it possible to offer programs to change that.”
We built a sky box over the basketball court that looked onto the basketball court and looked out on Jackie Robinson Park. Everybody in the building could see who was in there, but you had to be over 14 to be in the space, so it became the hot spot in the whole building. Their teen retention rate is now four times better at that club than other ones. This is what we can bring to schools, learning environments, and community centers to help solve real issues.
Q: How are classrooms and school spaces changing?
A: Flexibility is really important because of the different ranges of classroom size. Especially in the independent school world, things are taught in very different ways. We’ve had a great client together for a long time that is a school that specializes in students with learning challenges and different ways to learn. We need to have kind of a room within a room for special training and teaching and observation. The spatial organization is also different. The egress needs to be handled differently. The building really needs to support how the teaching is delivered.
Q: Have the charter schools you’ve designed been able to fill their seats?
A: Every charter school we’ve done is filled immediately from the local neighborhoods in which they reside.
Q: How does designing for a dense city differ from designing schools elsewhere?
A: It’s an interesting thing because most of the projects we’re talking about are really urban. It’s so different than schools in suburban environments or other places where you’ve got land to spread out. In other places, you’ve almost never got more than two stories. Here, we’re stacking kids in nine- and 10-story buildings, and then we need to figure out how those students circulate.
Q: So how do you design circulation in a multi-story school?
A: That’s where things have really changed. In one of the charters we did that’s multi-story, we have stairs, because you don’t put kids in the elevator. It’s really important to make the stairs great. The kids spend time on the stairs, every day, in between classes. The design has to be simple, thoughtful, and based on intuitive circulation because time between classes is really critical. It’s a very big deal.
Q: Can the layout of a building help students feel oriented and supported?
A: In the school in Baltimore, one of the issues they had was that a lot of times the kids weren’t consistently at school. Maybe they were with a different caregiver or another parent or something else was going on in their life. So we located what we called the house – where the servery and common room was for these grades – so that when you’re in first or second grade, you can see the one that was kindergarten, and you could see the one that’s third grade and fourth grade. This helps the students see where they’re going. Where did I come from, where am I going, what’s next? The building got more complex and multi-story as you got up to seventh- and eighth- grade, when you had the responsibility of moving yourself around the campus, not just class to class. You can take those things that were incidental in the past and bring them forward and give them an intentional place.
Q: How do you preserve a school’s culture when it moves into a much bigger building?
A: We had a school on the Upper West Side that was founded in a brownstone and they were moving to a new building. They had a co-tenant, but their portion was going to be about seven or eight stories. They were really concerned about the culture of the school, which had been built around the staircase in the townhouse so teachers and students and parents and everybody knew each other. We actually built the school with a big open stair all the way up through the middle and put the middle school up high and the lower school down low and the shared programs in the middle, so that you sort of took that mixing and stretched it out so that it all still happened.
Q: Has the Johns Hopkins school model been replicated elsewhere?
A: Instead of a charter, it’s called a contract school. It’s a public, Baltimore public school run by Johns Hopkins Department of Education by contract, so they provide a lot of the faculty, but not all and not everything.
It has not been replicated here, but it’s been replicated in other countries. We also learned from other countries when we were doing that work. The strength of the unions around a teacher owning their classroom is tough to shake in the United States, though.
You need it to be in places where people have that desire for experiment and innovation and understand what it can do for education. That’s always challenging when you’re in school systems. We deal with other places around the country and they’re fighting for budgets and asking why they should do something differently than the last school. There’s a lot of that out there.
Q: What keeps you committed to this kind of work, given how complex it is?
A: They’re very complex environments, but education is really one of the most fundamental commitments of being civilized. How you do it collectively, how you do it properly, how you do it in different environments, how you do it fairly, those are all real issues. As architects in this area, we’re right in the middle of that
Q: What’s an example of a project with a lot of constraints to solve at once?
A: We have a project right now up at Columbia University. They call it a plaza, but it’s actually the roof of a building below, and there’s four other buildings that egress onto the plaza to get to the street. How do we solve all of this at the same time?
My favorite is an example of where one of the independent schools is seven buildings built over 150 years. Two of the buildings are individual landmarks. One is a Mitchell-Lama housing project with a school underneath it. There are different jurisdictional agencies that get involved in each piece of it. I think that’s also where our experience comes into play; you don’t get daunted by all of that. We know we’re going to weave something out of this. We’ll find it.
Q: What does it take to deliver projects like these?
A: The more complex and problematic, the bigger the responsibility of design and architecture. You have to have the right contractor, the right subs, and they’re going to have to perform outside of the norm.
Q: What’s your prediction for the next few years in school design?
A: Each school is going to be different. We’re doing a lot of science facilities, more than the traditional labs and moving into science research. Some of these places actually bring PhDs doing work into the high school-level science programs. It takes very sophisticated equipment that can’t stop if there’s a blackout. It increases the level of sophistication.
The more normative classrooms are really about flexibility and quality of life issues. We are so much better now at controlling sound and making sure it’s a great listening environment, at managing natural light in all of the spaces. It’s a great place to be doing architecture at this time.
