From sales to education
Someone may argue that the Build School Project competition, organized at the initiative of the Union of Moscow Architects, was already held last year. However, it would be strange to call it a full-fledged award: projects are taken in a row, both realized and utopian, the jury chooses according to traditional tablets, the evaluation criteria are indistinct and feel far from objectivity.
Martela's approach is fundamentally different. Once the Russian representative office of this Finnish factory was engaged in the supply of furniture to schools and universities. But gradually it began to look at its task more broadly - the education system in Finland broke into a leading position in the world, and in order to sell transforming desks, which are usual for Helsinki, but incomprehensible for Russia, they had to begin to popularly explain that, in fact, the world has changed, the educational paradigm has changed, it is necessary to teach in a completely different way, and for a different learning, a different environment is needed. Explain, not just, along with the complete set of directly engaged in the design of schools, but also by initiating a number of educational activities.
And so it happened that the director of the Russian Martela Elena Aralova for two years in a row, in 2015 and 2016, oversaw the Architecture and Design stream at the EdCrunch international conference dedicated to education. Then the cases were mainly brought from abroad, albeit close ones: apart from Finland - Armenia, Kazakhstan. And in Russia there have already been projects on paper for the construction of the “best school” in Letovo and a gymnasium in Razdory. Nevertheless, the main idea was read: schools can be built differently (in general) and schools can be built differently here specifically - an entire session was devoted to discussing Russian norms and whether they really interfere (the correct answer is they interfere, but moderately, you just need to show the proper dexterity and imagination).
In the second year of the conference, the number of guests and cases, including Russian ones, increased. In each discussion, architects and directors deliberately clashed, because any innovative school is the result of their joint efforts. Projects such as the Engineering Building of the Tsaritsyno Educational Center at the State Farm named after Lenin, International School of Exupery in Latvia,"
Khoroshkola”in Khoroshevo-Mnevniki:“advanced”investors and patrons of art gradually joined the dialogue.
From enlightenment to prize
At the Martela Awards
The EdDesign Awards, launched in 2017, finally brought together all four initiative groups: designers, educators, selfless philanthropists and selfish but ideological developers. Actually, the prize arose at this moment because a whole galaxy of projects replaced individual attempts to create a modern educational environment: “There were striking precedents until 2016: Strelka Institute, Dostoevsky's library, school No. 5 in Yoshkar-Ola, children's garden in the state farm named after Lenin, - says Elena Aralova. - However, these were isolated cases. But suddenly, 2-3 years ago, a real boom began. And today I know more than 200 projects under construction for schools and kindergartens with the author's atypical architecture."
For the first Martela EdDesign Award, 56 realizations were selected from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Kaluga, Tyumen, Tambov, Saratov, Samara, Krasnodar, Pervouralsk, Veliky Novgorod, Minsk, Yerevan, Latvia - a total of 23 schools, 11 kindergartens, 13 libraries and centers of additional education, 6 game parks and 3 universities. More than half of them were visited by an expert council of 30 architects, educators and journalists personally, filling out impressive assessment questionnaires (according to their stories, the filling process alone took from 1.5 to 2 hours). As a result, 11 projects were shortlisted, gaining more than ⅔ points from the possible maximum, and finally the winners were chosen by another circle of experts.
It is noteworthy that taking on an educational function, the organizers of the award did not only an impressive work to collect information and form a representative cross-section of projects in the field of education, but also a detailed study of the Russian market, the results of which were shared at the ceremony. And in order to remind once again why, in fact, we all need a new educational environment, on the same day a conference of authoritative speakers was assembled in the General Staff of the Hermitage: neuropsychologist Tatiana Chernigovskaya, a team from Finland with the participation of the founders of the Kalasatama school and architects of the experimental schools in Sipoo, as well as the Japanese Takaharu Tezuki, who became famous all over the world for his round kindergarten with a courtyard and an exploited roof.
At the end of civilization: why not in the old way
So where did the need for a shift in the educational paradigm and the notorious new educational spaces come from? Now you can hear from many parents that before we were taught differently, and Russian education was rightly considered one of the best in the world, but now the country has been destroyed, etc. etc. They taught really differently: as teachers joke today, twenty years ago, looking at the calendar and at the clock, one could say with precision that at that moment pupils of the 6th grade in mathematics in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsk or pupils of the 5th grade were studying at the lessons of the Russian language in Rostov-on-Don. A single program and a rigid schedule dictated a certain school structure: standard classes designed for frontal work with the same number of students, strict specialization of scientific rooms, monotonous corridors, which were assigned only the role of transit routes. This system had its advantages: it coped with the task of universal literacy, set 100 years ago.
Only today we found ourselves in a different world and a different civilization. Our children are from the “Google generation” and, unlike us, did not sequentially master the typewriter, computer and smartphone, but were already born in the digital world. Chernigovskaya said a lot about this: “What once took millennia, then centuries, then decades, then at least years, now happens almost in days. And you need to have a prepared consciousness, I would even say, a prepared brain for this terrible speed, when everything changes instantly: you have not yet had time to get used to what you are learning, but it is already outdated … A teacher who comes to class opens a book and reads the obvious things that a child with the help of simple manipulations can get every second lying on the couch at home - such a teacher is no longer needed. Education should be based on understanding, not memorization. We need to educate children to cope with stress and constant change, develop information-checking skills and teach them how to learn.”
Modern teachers add to this a number of key “competencies of a 21st century specialist”: the ability to negotiate and work in a team, flexibility and creativity of thinking, leadership qualities and the ability to make decisions in conditions of high uncertainty (that is, just when everything changes every second) … In Khoroshkola, for example, which was expected to be shortlisted for the Martela EdDesign Awards (architecture - A-Project. K), the concept of learning is clothed in the “rule of three Qs”: IQ (intelligence quotient), EQ (emotional intelligence) and VQ (vital energy coefficient). IQ is what the traditional school gives, hard skills, “hard skills”. Soft skills - the ability to communicate, the ability to empathy, emotional intelligence, which increases the quality and richness of life. Plus, with an increase in the educational load, schoolchildren need to instill the ability to manage life energy - to restore their own strength and energize others, which contributes to the development of leadership qualities. Obviously, spaces adapted to embody such concepts also require a conceptual approach to space design.
From theory to practice: how to design in a new way
How, in connection with all this, should the architecture and interiors of educational institutions change? Firstly, the classes are no longer fixed both in size and in internal organization: sliding partitions and transformable furniture appear, with the help of which it is easy to change the arrangement of desks for work in small groups or, conversely, for a lecture with a large number of listeners. Finnish architects from JKMM and K2s shared their practical experience in this area.
Secondly, great importance is attached not even to classes, but to public spaces. Recreations are finally beginning to live up to their name and are turning from faceless halls into multifunctional areas for communication and individual relaxation or learning. At the Letovo school (a joint project of the Dutch bureau Atelier PRO and the Russian ATRIUM), the so-called Crystal, a school-wide atrium, is simultaneously a meeting place, a lecture hall, a theater rehearsal hall, and a school forum.
They require a rethinking of the space of libraries: in today's schools, they are at least transformed into a kind of Internet cafes with free Wi-Fi and access to an electronic catalog with extensive media content. And as a maximum, libraries are becoming interactive laboratories for self-study - such as "Rzhevskaya" in St. Petersburg (winner in the "Library" nomination, authors of the project - KIDZ bureau): it is equipped with 3D printers and a robotics workshop, there is a room with glasses virtual reality and even a book can be borrowed without the participation of a librarian - using the "smart shelf" technology.
It is important that in a school or preschool institution there is a space where different generations would intersect: at the International School of Exupery (Latvian Bureau 8 AM), whose project won the first prize in the category "Schools", kindergarten kids spending time in the courtyard, they can observe the studies of high school students, and during breaks and after school, they can walk with them.
Speaking of walks. In the nomination "Playground" won the "Fairy forest" in the Kazan "Gorkinsko-Ometyevsky forest", designed by the Moscow bureau "Chekhard". It is a space for both play and learning, motivating to explore the forest environment. The authors themselves call it "an eco-oriented open-air educational classroom." The local eco-center is already organizing classes here: especially for such initiatives, the architects have provided a round amphitheater with stump seats. In an amicable way, such "open-air classrooms" could appear not only in the forest, but in every school yard.
Of no less importance is the presence of places of solitude. In the traditional Soviet school, they did not think about this at all, however, for the psychological comfort of children in modern educational spaces, they cannot be done without them. It is not for nothing that the first place in the Kindergarten nomination and at the same time the Grand Prix of the Martela EdDesign Awards was given to the project “I am in the house” by the St. Petersburg designer Andrey Strelchenko. In the interior he invented, there are a lot of places that children, in accordance with their ideas and preferences, could adapt to a "house".
It is interesting that if, for example, in the same Finnish projects of schools and even kindergartens natural colors of wood and concrete predominate (the Finns are sincerely convinced that children themselves should add brightness to the interiors), then Russian educational spaces, borrowing the best planning solutions from foreign analogues, are still in no hurry to paint in ascetic tones. This surprised the foreign experts of the award a lot, and Ksenia Malich, a researcher at the State Hermitage and an expert from the Russian side, explained this by the peculiarity of our mentality: stingy means poor. “If it is elegantly decorated, it means that someone made an effort, someone made an effort, it means that there is an owner. Although, as it seems to me, these ideas are also gradually becoming obsolete."
Indeed, the interiors of five schools, as a result of being shortlisted, are rich in textures rather than colors. Because they provoke play and research, that is, they form a developing environment not bright spots, but interesting textures and elements.
This is society
The most radical view of what should be the place where children grow up is, perhaps, professed by Takaharu Tezuka. It's even amazing how a student of the founder of high-tech, Richard Rogers, turned into the main romantic architect of our time, as Tezuka was called after recording a TED lecture about "the world's best kindergarten."
At first glance, his approach is akin to the modern European one: when designing kindergartens and centers - as well as houses or museums - he proceeds from the life scenarios of future inhabitants. However, its architecture does not so much adapt and adapt as it "educates". Moreover, it educates not through building boundaries, but on the contrary, through complete freedom of action. In that very "best kindergarten", for example, a roof on which you can run plays a huge role, and its round shape motivates better than any pedagogical attitudes: kids of their own free will run several kilometers a day, they do not need to be forced to do so. There is no need to force them to sit quietly in the classroom: the classes are also located in a circle and there are no partitions between them, which means that sooner or later the child will still return to where he ran away from.
The lack of partitions will seem to many to be an interfering factor: the children will allegedly be constantly distracted by what is happening in the next class. But Tezuka claims that they will experience real discomfort in silence, and background noise is a completely natural state for all of us, which should not be hindered. By the way, in some Russian schools (for example, in the International School of Kazan, the Fielding Nair International project), they have already "grown" to the glass walls in the classrooms, although initially the objections were the same: they will be distracted! But it turned out the opposite: in open space, children learn to concentrate better.
The Japanese is very philosophical about physical danger. One can only imagine how our compatriot mothers would gasp when they saw the construction of the playground designed by Tezuka. Not only can you hit your head easily, but also fly somersault from the upper level, since there are no obstacles. “Children need small doses of danger these days,” says Takaharu. “This is how they learn to help each other. This is society."
Sources of inspiration
According to a World Bank study, student performance in custom-designed schools rises by at least 16%. That is, the need to create such individual projects is a proven fact. But how well do these arguments "work" in Russian realities? And who should the initiative really come from?
If you recall the projects "Khoroshkola", "Letovo", schools in the State Farm named after Lenin, then this is not the state and not even investors, but patrons of the arts - people who invest their own funds not for profit, but for ideological reasons. Answering the question of which ones, Pavel Grudinin, who invested 1.8 billion rubles in the construction of the Tsaritsyno Corps of Engineers, recalled that philanthropists had been in Russia from time immemorial and suggested that wives and mothers often stand behind their actions.
Elena Bulin-Sokolova, the director of Khoroshkola (and her ideological inspirers are just the Gref couple), is sure that “these people want to do something for Russia. Many of them are business people, people who look at the labor market, eagerly trying to remove from it the most talented, capable of thinking creatively, critically analyzing, and working in a team. And these are the people who are so needed by a modern employer and who are practically not trained by modern schools."
Some interesting examples of schools grow out of talented teachers or experienced educational institutions that need additional sites. First, Nikita Mishin attracted the DAR fund, which supports education throughout the country, with his program of turning a backward district school in Moscow into the most advanced, and now he opened his New School on the territory of the Mosfilmovsky residential complex - however, having moved into an already finished building … But the Moscow State Technical University. N. E. Bauman acted more far-sightedly: already at the construction stage of the residential complex"
Symbol "on the site of the former plant" Hammer and Sickle "in Moscow with the developer" Donstroy "reached agreements, and a specialized school-lyceum - their joint brainchild together with the authors of the project bureau ATRIUM.
However, the most pleasant trend that promises that progressive schools on an individual project will appear in almost every new or reconstructed district of Moscow is the interest in modern educational spaces on the part of developers. The projects of the Krost Concern are so far only private educational institutions “not for everyone”, but the new kindergarten of the PIK Group in the Varshavskie Ogni residential complex is a “typical” kindergarten in a “typical” new residential complex. But the architects of buromoscow approached it in a completely atypical way, starting with the creation of comics, which formed the basis of the functional program, and ending with the round shape of the building with an inner courtyard - almost like Takaharu Tezuki's.
GK A101 - the largest developer in New Moscow - has already put into its portfolio a project of a "regular" school, implemented taking into account the latest trends. This includes a media library, a food court-style open dining room, and extended multifunctional recreations.
Ignatius Danilidi, Deputy General Director of A101 Group of Companies, believes that the interest in the formation of a new educational environment on the part of private developers and investors will grow: “Residential development cannot exist without social security. The state is in no hurry to help with this, and we ourselves must provide our residents with all the necessary infrastructure. And when you spend your own money, you don't care what product you get. Gradually, we became interested in what buildings are being built in the world today, what technological solutions are used and inevitably came to the topic of the educational process and the creation of a special educational environment. Sooner or later, this comes to the fore, you begin, in parallel with the construction, to select the teaching staff, to broaden your horizons with them. This is a very interesting task."
And so far, there is no systemic solution to it for Russia. If in Finland the phrase "typical project" is forgotten once and for all, and the state itself sponsors the development of new solutions, then here it is still, albeit very interesting, but a task of several enthusiasts. Which they themselves put in front of themselves. Most likely, as in Moscow it has already happened with housing, the buyer sooner or later will want to take the child to a kindergarten or school near the house, and not take him to the other end of the city. Everyone will start to take into account the demands of the market.
But until then, it would be nice for architects to become active players, rather than passive executors of the order. One of the findings of a study conducted by Martela is that Russian architectural stars do not so often take on projects for schools and kindergartens. It is clear that it is still easier for developers to re-link a ready-made project and not order a new one. The task of architects in this case is to convince, show examples, educate, inspire. As Einstein wrote: "Inspiration is more important than knowledge." And these same words could become a slogan for the educational paradigm that we all have to build together.
