Urban Myths

Bordwell

Raymond Bordwell, director of facilities planning at the architecture and interior design firm Perkins & Will, and an authority on urban school planning and design, has been a practicing architect for 20 years. In 1985, while working at another firm, he became involved in a large Ohio school project with Perkins & Will, and he says once he started working on schools he never looked back. Bordwell went to Perkins & Will about 10 years ago and has been involved in school projects in 15 states and about six different countries.

Joe De Patta: Where does your interest and dedication to urban schools come from?

Raymond Bordwell: When I first went to work for Perkins & Will I lived in New York. I spent a lot of time in the city’s urban schools and did some outreach programs. At Christmas time we’d play Santa Claus for the school kids and pass out hats and gloves. We’d get a big bag of hats and gloves and hand them out at Christmas parties. We had a lot of fun doing that.

I realized the things that were written about the baseline information, benchmarking, and site size requirements for schools were all geared around suburban schools and didn’t apply to the conditions in urban schools. I became an advocate for good design and innovative planning ideas for urban schools.

JD: What defines an urban school?

RB: There are some characteristics you often see. You can find populations where 70 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch programs and their dropout rates are 40 or 50 percent in high school. Looking at who the students are defines it for me.

JD: What makes urban schools unique? Why are they their own niche?

RB: They’re unique because there are a series of issues they deal with that you don’t have in suburban schools. Those who can afford to move out of the city into the suburbs often have two cars, the kids have two parents and at least one of the parents is college educated and focused on education.

In an urban population there may or may not be two parents in the house, there may be four children, and they could be sharing an apartment with other families. You don’t see the breakfast program as often in suburban schools because parents can afford to give their kids breakfast at home. There are a lot of conditions that drive their way down to facility design decisions.

JD: At the 2002 CEFPI conference, you were a panel member debating urban facility planning, and it was said that there’s a ‘massive movement to update urban facilities, which is the most enormous challenge ever faced by facility planners, architects, and administrators.’ Why is the task so challenging?

RB: I stand behind that statement. A lot of the challenges we’re seeing are in the Northeast or East where there are older urban centers. I think there’s a school in the Bronx that was a hospital during the Civil War. It’s still being used. Age and neglect have a lot to do with the movement. You know, building programs in these larger districts don’t need a $30 million or $40 million high school. They need a billion dollars worth of work, or $400 million in renovations. If you have $400 million and you need a billion, what you do with the $400 million becomes fairly critical.

JD: How does a school district manage such a task?

RB: There are a lot of districts dealing with this issue right now. But if you asked me which one is dealing with a $400 million or $500 million program and is the lighthouse that other districts should look to, I’m not sure I could tell you where that is. Administering that kind of work is a challenge. What are the standards?

If you have five high schools in a district, and you can build a new high school, you have a choice to make. You can either build a new high school, with a new model to address the needs of the next 40 years and risk equity issues because the other high schools are out of date, or you can take the new facility, dumb it down to the level of the other four high schools, and everyone gets an even education. That’s politically expedient, and in a lot of ways people think it’s the right thing to do. I’m not sure they’ll feel that way in 40 years.

JD: The objectives of that CEFPI panel were, among other things, to recognize the obstacles faced in urban environments and establish strategies to work through them. What are the most common obstacles? What are some of the solutions?

RB: Common obstacles are political agenda, equity, and benchmarking. I believe that looking at averages of numbers for buildings that have been occupied for five years and designed five years before that based on ideas from five years earlier is not the benchmark we should be looking to use as a point of departure. I’m not suggesting a new model has to be bigger, I’m suggesting that a new model potentially contain different types of program space.

JD: What types of program spaces? What are the trends?

RB: Some of the trends include the use of other facilities as part of the school day. If there’s a museum across the street from a school, can you use the theater? Can you build joint-use facilities? Public/private partnerships are also a trend.

Hours of operation are changing. If a student has to drop out to support a family, there ought to be a way of getting that student to go to school at night. There are night schools if you’re 19 years old but there aren’t any if you’re 17. That changes the way we look at libraries and what space is open at night. We are seeing the cyber-café idea. We talk about the use of computers in schools, but if those kids don’t have access to computers, that’s hurting them. The kids in the suburbs may have laptops and high speed Internet access. What about the kids in the city? We have to give them access to that technology if they’re going to compete while also keeping it secure in Laptop storage towers.

JD: Do urban school trends ultimately trickle down to suburban school districts and influence their designs? Or is it the other way.

RB: I think urban schools are trying to react to the trends that are being set in the suburbs. Interdisciplinary science labs, for instance. Teaching chemistry and biology together in one lab are programmatically being driven by suburban schools. In the inner city, when you have half the class reading below grade level, you’ve got basic needs that have to be met. I think suburban design, reacting to more progressive, curricular issues, is what’s driving innovation right now.

JD: What makes you excited about the direction urban school design is headed? What gives you pause?

RB: I’m currently dealing with several clients who are saying, “What we’ve done in the past isn’t working, to repeat that is to continue the cycle. We want to take a risk and do something different.” I think they are trying to do different things, even more than schools in the suburbs. And they need to. They not only have to capture students and keep them there, they have to recapture students who have left. Clients with those kinds of approaches excite me.

What gives me pause is that I don’t believe the process always has the student in mind. They should be the focus and that’s where the largest percentage of the effort should go.

JD: Space issues greatly affect urban school renovation and expansion. How do you deal with that issue in an urban setting?

RB: Renovation is an important topic. You can’t build a new school every time. You have to establish a process for renovation that starts with the big idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. You should start with student needs. Then you have to explore the existing facilities and clearly define existing opportunities and limitations. In some cases that means the building has to go away. When it gets to the point where you have to spend 75 or 80 percent of a new school’s budget on renovating a 100-year-old building, you have to ask yourself if that’s the best investment.

JD: Are security issues greater in an urban school? How is that being handled?

RB: There are different types of safety and security issues. Hallways get too narrow and become friction points. A great deal of the safety problems occur between students when the bell rings. The kids are funneled into a small area; they’re like molecules. They start rubbing together and friction creates heat. Informal interaction becomes difficult, but kids need to be kids and talk with their friends when they aren’t in class. Where do they do that if they take all that space out of the building?

JD: Do urban populations have a greater concentration of students than suburban school districts, therefore leading to greater problems with overcrowding?

RB: In the suburbs you have zoning laws, you can only build so many houses in an area. You know you can’t exceed a certain number of residences, and each family statistically has 1.2 kids.

We don’t even know how many kids are living in an apartment in urban areas. With “No Child Left Behind,” if one school is failing but the school across town isn’t, a parent has the right to petition the school board to move their child. How does that effect enrollment? What about charter schools? You can plan for a 1,000-student school and a 500-student charter school opens across the street, does that effect your 1,000-student school? What happens if the charter school closes?

JD: Architecturally, is there a particular style endemic to urban schools? Is there a move to make urban schools into signature buildings?

RB: I would like to think so. If you look at our histories, schools were grand places that had all the honor and status of a city hall. They were community landmarks. Funding, again, has driven us to look at reduced costs. I don’t think there is an overall movement to build landmark, signature buildings in the urban environment, but I wish it were another way. I’d settle for a strong movement to build signature curricular buildings in the urban area and to build truly 21st century, hands-on, connected, experiential-type buildings that could teach as well as contain teaching and learning.

JD: Is there anything you’d like to say that I haven’t asked you? Do you have any final comments?

RB: I’m grateful for the conversation that’s going on right now about urban schools. I think awareness is being raised. I have a lot of respect for the educators we work with in urban environments across the county, for their commitment and dedication. I respect their awareness of educational trends and student needs. They are aware of the need to take a risk, do things differently and better, not to dumb down solutions but look at breaking the mold. These people are heroes. It is my goal to do everything I can to help them have a place to get the support for the work they’re trying to do.