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Terry Hyer, principal architect at ECI/ Hyer in Anchorage, has been involved in more than 40 school design projects in Alaska, including Alpenglow Elementary School which has won honors from the American Association of School Administrators/American Institute of Architects/Council of Educational Facility Planners, International Architecture Jury, among others. Here are some excerpts from a recent conversation:

Northwest Education:
What do you like about designing schools?
Terry Hyer: Schools are such wonderful facilities to design. Because they're places for discovery, schools should provide an environment that enhances the learning process — not only from the students' standpoint, but also from the staff's standpoint. I think it makes a big difference if the staff is really excited about going to work every day and about the spaces they're in.

NW: And yet it seems that a lot of school design is the opposite of exciting.
Hyer: In the early days of my career I would feel frustrated when I'd hear a speaker talking about new trends in education design. I always came away going, "I don't see a new trend. We're doing it the same old way." There's a lot of room for more collaboration between educators and architects to define improved environments for teaching and learning. Sometimes architects stretch out there to try to create something new and fail because the educators haven't participated in the solution. If the educators don't buy into it and aren't willing to teach in that environment, it's not going to work. I'm excited about some of the middle school concepts that are catching on and moving into the high schools. I see it as a more pronounced change and adjustment in the way we look at the delivery of the educational curriculum of any that this country's gone through in many, many years.

NW: You mean in terms of smaller, more intimate spaces?
Hyer: Smaller, more intimate spaces, more real-world relationships, more interdisciplinary curriculum delivery, team teaching. Teachers can learn to work together and show kids that there's an interconnectedness among subjects. Maybe you're a great mathematician, but if you can't communicate with people, you can't get your ideas across. It doesn't work very well to give kids 50 minutes to learn math, and 50 minutes later they're expected to learn social studies, and 50 minutes later they're expected to learn something else, and there's no interrelationship between them.

NW: So, as an architect, how would you begin to translate that kind of a notion into space design?
Hyer: Well, that's the real challenge — how do you support a philosophy with a physical, tangible space? You want a school that is welcoming in appearance. You want some color, you want some interest, you want people to feel good about the entry. And it goes without saying that it needs to function. All those appropriate spaces need their proper adjacencies and you need to be efficient with the utilization. You've got a fixed amount of square footage, and that's where the architect, working with the community, develops priorities as to how you sprinkle that square footage across the programs. You could, for instance, have large classrooms, but you might have to have a smaller gymnasium to make up for that. If you had a lot of area devoted to the physical education component, you might wind up with smaller classrooms.

NW: What other factors get in the way?
Hyer: The fear of litigation is hampering some good design. Safety is paramount in a school where you've got hundreds of children and staff. But it does affect some of the spaces you can create. Some years ago we did an elementary school that had some little loft kinds of things built into the classrooms. It had guardrails around it and so forth, it wasn't too high off the floor, but it was kind of a neat little space that was special to the scale of the children that you're talking about. It could be used for little reading alcoves. There was even a cavelike space underneath where kids could crawl.

NW: Oh, how neat.
Hyer: The district was going to do some more of these schools, and ultimately took that out of the design because there was some concern that a child might be injured by falling. I can appreciate that, and we don't want to do something that puts children at risk. I think that's one of the challenges we have to take on as architects. And that's where the cross-fertilization with educators needs to come in. The teacher needs to be able to be creative and figure out how to teach in a different environment than what they're accustomed to.

NW: I remember a period of time when schools were being designed with a lot of big, open spaces. Has that gone away?
Hyer: Gone away and coming back a little bit. Open classroom concepts swept through classrooms all over the country. The idea was flexibility and team teaching. But it took teachers out of their comfort zone of having their own individual classroom with four walls. And they didn't know how to deal with it.

NW: Is a beautiful school more expensive than an ugly school?
Hyer: No.

NW: Really? My perception would be that a really neat-looking, innovative design would cost more.
Hyer: It depends on the design team and the district. If you have a design team that is creative — and if they'll allow the design team to really be creative — that's the secret to it, not necessarily whether you have a tremendous budget. I mean, budget does play a part, but creativity plays a much bigger role.

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