How primary schools really work: Architecture, use, and perspectives

Abstract

Schools are an important class of architecture. This is for many reasons, not least because primary schools are the first public buildings that most children inhabit for a significant amount of their waking hours and are, thus, their first experience of what should be quality built environment design. To ensure this quality, occupied building evaluation should be an important endeavour in architectural practice. Recent school building performance evaluations have been undertaken from the perspective of facilities management, or building-science, using 'expert' judgement to assess the used built environment. This presents two concerns. First, these techno-economic positions assume that behaviour of users is predictable and logical over the life of the school building, and omits the variety of users, activities, and experience of the 'Architecture'. Second, by using so-called professional 'experts', building performance often omits the voice of users (staff and students) who are expert in their own environment. The primary objective of this inquiry was to, first, establish architectural research methods suitable for including primary school users in building performance evaluation and, second, apply it to investigate the context and user perspective of their school built environment. Five primary schools, located in the Adelaide, South Australia, were selected for recognised heritage, architectural, and educational facility values, and recruited to participate in a mixed-method case study inquiry, as critical cases. Because school architecture and school occupants form a building-occupant system, this inquiry needed a range of data collection methods to capture the system. Architectural assessment, physical (environmental monitoring) and social science (surveys, visual ethnography) data collection methods were integrated to create rich case study interpretations of the schools, at school and classroom units of analysis. It was observed that the building fabric, regardless of age or design intentions, was modified to introduce contemporary permanent technological and sustainability innovations, and also for transitory occupational needs. Data triangulation found that user perspectives of the primary school architecture differed between staff and students, and this difference was aligned with each cohort’s active use of different school facilities. Exploratory Principal Axis Factoring using student participant responses resulted in five factors loaded on variables grouped around wellbeing, smell, acoustics, vision, and satisfaction, in order of their contribution to variance. This suggests that their environment quality is particularly important to primary school students. This finding was confirmed when triangulated against the qualitative data collected. Given this, and the emergent findings from the triangulated staff perspectives with other methods, it was deduced that user perspectives could be grouped into four themes: Place/Architecture, Functionality, Wellbeing, and Environment. These are proposed as a new quality framework and used to as a lens to review the success of recent school technological and sustainability innovations. This research suggests that omitting user voices from building performance evaluation omits important sources of knowledge and design learning since, even with the best intentions, non-occupants, expert or not, cannot speak on behalf of primary school users. This flexible, technosocio paradigm also offers a framework for interdisciplinary research that integrates the knowledge of other disciplines into future architectural inquiries.