Cameron Sinclair, architect and cofounder of Architecture for Humanity, is not one to dither. Rather than getting tangled up in dead-end debates on the state of education today, he prefers to get busy designing and building structures for communities in need. In 2009, he and his team launched an international design competition to imagine the classroom of the future.
The genesis of the idea was Sinclair’s eye-opening journey through what he calls the “asbestos-laden, rat-infested education infrastructure of America,” including visits to ramshackle trailers-cum-classrooms in post-Katrina Mississippi. “Six million kids in America are [going to school] in trailers that are basically toxic boxes,” says Sinclair. “We have to build 10 million new classrooms in the next five years just so kids can get a primary education. We need learning environments that are equipped for the future.”
The structure of the contest was simple: participants were asked to collaborate with actual students to design classrooms that solved problems unique to particular communities. Collectively, more than 10,000 people took part in the process, and the contest brought 400 high-level submissions from architects, designers, and engineers in over 60 countries.
The winning classroom design, by a team called Section Eight, was developed for the Teton Valley Community School in Victor, Idaho. The plans describe a cost-effective, sustainable structure that is both highly flexible (movable panels allow students to reconfigure their classroom space) and a teaching tool itself: from the science lab, students can see the entire heating and cooling system of the building.
Perhaps the greatest outcome of the competition was the cross-cultural conversations it sparked between students and architects from around the world. The information gathered during these exchanges is now available on the Open Architecture Network, an open-source forum for the architectural community. This sharing of design solutions is Sinclair’s higher purpose. “Our goal,” he says, “is to share a portfolio of solutions, all of which are replicable and free for others to adapt and change.”
For now, only the winning classroom design will be funded, but Sinclair hopes to develop a framework for financing other classroom projects the world over. “We have the opportunity to build schools globally starting now,” he says. “The question is not how–it’s when. We’re ready to go.”
Jennifer Leonard is co-author of Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, and a Senior Project Lead at IDEO in San Francisco.
