ARCH_500-600 Comprehensive Options Studio: A Montessori School: Space and Learning in Contemporary Elementary Education

This studio program engaged the comprehensive design of a small Montessori school. The pedagogical intentions were: 1) In designing elementary schools, architects exercise a critically important influence on children—the opportunity to change society for the better; 2) Self-determined, “learning by making” educational practices, such as Montessori, are today being increasingly recognized as the most effective way to educate young children and to integrate them into their environment and their culture; 3) What matters in architecture is not what a building looks like, but what a building is like to be in, to live in—how it is experienced in inhabitation by many people over many years; 4) As we begin the 21st century, every architectural project should be understood as an addition to a pre-existing inhabited context, whether urban, suburban, or rural, and new projects are often called upon to remedy past environmental mistakes.

Rather than beginning with a written program and designated site, the studio began with two projects, each approximately two-and-a-half weeks in length, both of which were to some degree inspired by Louis Kahn’s thoughts on beginning design with an inhabited space rather than a pre-determined program. 

The first project, entitled “Carving the Classroom: Abstract CUBE,” is intentionally abstract (meaning “to draw from”), and involved constructing a highly resolved proposal for a single Montessori classroom, engaging the Froebel gifts and their underlying geometries as ordering concepts, as well as engaging the fundamentally spatial and experiential definition of the Montessori education of “learning though making.” 

The second project, entitled “Etching the Earth: Concrete DATUM,” was intentionally concrete (meaning “to grow together”), and involved each student evolving a highly resolved spatial proposal, deploying the programmatic elements of the Montessori school to construct a “society of spaces” as an inhabited surface, allowing a re-conceptualization of the ground plane. 

These exercises introduced students to, and engaged the program of use for, the Montessori school and allowed them to develop and construct an idealized Montessori classroom and school (the “poetics of human action”). Students were then given the site for the school, which they developed over the remaining ten weeks of the semester. 

As part of the final development of their designs, students undertook a third project, entitled “Making Place Between Earth and Sky: Tectonic SECTION,” wherein a section of each student’s designs, connecting earth (foundation) to sky (roof), was explored at large scale. This was the first component of the final jury presentation requirements. 

The final project in this comprehensive studio involved bringing the building design to a high level of resolution, and, as is appropriate to the “tectonic culture” of Modern architecture, students were asked to resolve “the poetics of construction” of their design, developing the materials, construction, and details that shape the interior experience of their school’s inhabitants—the ultimate measure of the quality of any work of architecture.