VERTICAL SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE: A Research Manual to Support Best Practice in an Urban Context
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2021
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City centres are becoming increasingly desirable residential locations for couples and young families, reversing a decades-old trend of population flight to outlying suburbs. As the populations of cities grow, large tracts of land which would support a traditional horizontal model of school design are no longer obtainable and are not financially viable. Therefore, for urban schools to accommodate the densification of cities, school design must transition from building outward to upward.
Vertical School Architecture is a case study analysis of the spatial planning for secondary co-educational multi-storey school models in inner-urban areas across the globe. Land economics, tight site restrictions and large accommodation briefs require a school design more aligned with high-rise construction than its suburban predecessors, posing new opportunities and challenges for the facilitation of education, student wellbeing and city-making. In this thesis, the spatial organisation patterns that emerge in vertical school design precedents are documented and considered as a resource to assist the thinking of architects, school administrations and government officials when delivering school architecture of a similar type.
Recent publications on school design focus predominately on the functional requirements of an individual space, such as the arrangement of an innovative learning environment and how it relates to its pedagogical aims. While that research is critical to understanding how learning environments should look in the twenty-first century, it does not acknowledge how all the parts of contemporary urban schools come together within a building plan and section. Therefore, the research herein endeavours to fill this gap by illustrating how the spatial diagram of vertical school precedents addresses strict site constraints to deliver a holistic, functional and connected organisational strategy.
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