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It's very interesting. They remind me of self organizing campgrounds. I don't mean when all the tents are laid out military style. Rather, it's more like when each camper(s) decides where to site their tent without a centralized plan. My sense is that the rooms themselves create issues for construction and furniture expenses that would make them cost prohibited. But let's say that could be rectified. The classroom since 1900 has been square or a half moon stadium. We don't have many asymmetrical classrooms. Yet, the world today is increasingly rewarding asymmetrical thinkers and doers. The uniformity of the industrial revolution factory and office has given way to far different ways to work. School has not kept up and there's so much institutional momentum that is preventing change. I don't think architecture solves these issues. It's more about aligning architecture to support necessary changes - not necessarily to drive the change. That means unfreezing our notions of how things ought to look and operate. One thing I'm certain of - our current models for school will increasingly be at odds with the demands of the world. The more we insist on uniformity, the more the world rejects it. Kids today need to develop the competencies of how to learn rapidly instead of learning rote facts or studying to tests. They need to develop the capacity for thinking agility, connecting patterns across different complex sets of data. They need to carry a mindset of fail fast, learn fast - where as failure in school in the past was an academic death sentence. They also need to learn self awareness and how to grow self awareness over a lifetime. That's on top of repeated, practical applications of math, the scientific method, systems dynamics in history and social sciences, language and communication skills - all in real world settings. In fact, the best place to learn might be in a real job and not even in a classroom. I know one thing for sure - the workplace structures of the future will make these two computer generated renderings seem simple and quaint in comparison. I don't know if these are the "right" designs. I do know we better be capable of looking at "different" and find the good in it, rather than reacting to it being different than what we expected.

Check out Churchville-Chili Junior High School (now the 9th Grade Academy).

It looks like a map of suburbia. Collectors, feeders and arterials. No doubt, way-finding is just as onerous.