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In accordance with the National Science Education Standards, suggestions for the development of quality science facilities are provided. One of these recommendations is first to complete a curriculum review, because curriculum should shape the science facility. Everyone involved in the planning process must identify what is envisioned for new facilities and then remain involved in the design and construction phases.

Each chapter begins with a “Key Ideas” summary. Chapter 1 discusses how to plan school science facilities. This is followed by steps in the design and building of the new facility. Chapter 2 covers “Current Trends and Future Directions in Science Education.” Most importantly, the planner needs to have a vision of the future (when technological changes are expected).

Safety guidelines are highlighted in Chapter 3. The importance of providing safe space for each student, safe storage of chemicals, ventilation, fume hoods, and minimizing litigation are topics covered.

Chapter 4 focuses on “Designing Facilities for the Elementary School.” We found this section in valuable as we planned our school’s new labs. From space requirements, number of sinks needed, storage options, and providing utilities, to lighting and darkening rooms, many valuable suggestions are provided. Needs for grades K-2 and grades 3-5 are presented.

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss designing facilities for the middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12), and they provide two popular models for science classrooms (moveable lab stations and fixed lab stations). The need for providing computers and other technology is important in the middle school and high school labs. Ideas for teacher space, preparation and storage rooms, student project areas, and small group spaces are included.

“Green Schools” is a new chapter in this edition. Key ideas include accessing natural areas surrounding the school and using outside spaces such as courtyards, ponds, and rain gardens for teaching. Photos provide several useful ideas, from installing a large weather-safe compass and sundial to having an imbedded solar system model in a courtyard.

Chapter 8 has further suggestions for using science spaces to enhance teaching, such as sliding shades that double as bulletin boards, two-way windows that enable students to share projects with the hallway, and using patterns on the floor and ceiling as learning spaces.

Chapter 9, entitled “Science for All,” provides the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines. The ADA checklist is invaluable for planning.

The appendix includes checklists for safety; critical dimensions; equipment; checklists for elementary, middle school, and high school labs; a glossary of construction terms; the NSTA position statement on the role of lab investigations in science instruction; and a useful bibliography.

Throughout the book, there are many photographs, floor plans, and checklists. Teachers, science specialists, school board members, architects, and all involved with the planning, designing, and building of exemplary science facilities will benefit from this invaluable resource. Indeed, our school has three excellent science labs because we followed the guidelines in the first edition.

This review originally appeared in the February 1, 2008 edition of Science & Children.

Science is a hands-on subject in which students experience science by carrying out investigations. Generally these investigations require equipment and materials to be set up before a class starts and taken down when the class ends. Planners should determine the appropriate cost of new or renovated science facilities before budgets are set as their costs differ a lot from standard classrooms.

“We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.”
- Sir Winston Churchill

Most educational facility planners are familiar with Churchill’s comment, however, this concept is nowhere more valid than in the planning and design of science facilities. Unfortunately, the budgets for school science facilities are often set well before any real planning has taken place and are set by those who have never taught science and, therefore, do not know the appropriate questions to ask.

An eminent educational facility planner recently asked me about the recommended formula for determining the number of science lab/classrooms needed for a high school (Appendix I of the NSTA Guide to Planning School Science Facilities, Second Edition). That formula determines the number of such spaces by calculating the number of students likely to be taking science each year, dividing that number by 24 (the maximum number of students in a science class for safety), dividing that number by the number of class periods in a day, then dividing that number by a factor of say 70%. My questioner indicated that his school district clients would not allow the use of the 70% factor because that would leave expensive space vacant for 30% of a day. Clearly these clients do not understand how science is taught.

Science is a hands-on subject in which students experience science

Astrometrics Lab in Entry Tower

by carrying out investigations. Generally these investigations require equipment and materials to be set up before a class starts and taken down when the class ends. Of course, a teacher could do this during class time, using the first, say, ten minutes of the class period to set up and the last ten minutes to clean up, leaving the students time to do whatever high school students might be inclined to do with unsupervised and unstructured time in class. However, if a typical class period is, say, 50 minutes long, the set-up and take-down time then occupies 40% of the available teaching time. Knowing this I suspect most schools would opt to have the set-up and take-down time take place when students are not in class.

Student Project Space

In another recent example, the science faculty of a suburban high school spent many hours with a science facility planner developing the ideal spaces and arrangements of spaces that would serve their district’s hands-on, inquiry-based approach to science education. Included in the resulting space program were long-term student project spaces and small group meeting rooms in which students could plan and carry out projects which would take more than a single class period. Once the programming effort was completed, a “project executive” took control of the design and construction process. This resulted in a larger, more expensive and less efficient building that omitted the project spaces and the small group meeting rooms and separated the lab/classrooms from the centralized prep and storage spaces which they had originally been programmed to surround. Neither the “project executive” nor the school board he served understood the need for the project and meeting spaces nor the safety issues involved in separating the prep/storage areas from the lab/classrooms they served. Thus what could have been a wonderfully flexible and functional facility was reduced to something barely adequate for twenty first century science instruction.

In the mid 1990s a group within the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) set about developing a national guideline for the planning and design of school science facilities. To avoid reinventing the wheel, the group researched guidelines published by various states as well as some foreign countries. Maryland, Texas, California, North Carolina and the United Kingdom had published fairly extensive guidelines and other U.S. states including Connecticut, Florida and Indiana had some less extensive guidelines for science facility design. In virtually all cases, the maximum safe class size was recommended to be 24 students and the minimum floor area per student in the teaching space ranged from 45 to 60 square feet. Subsequent detailed research by Dr. Sandra West, a member of the planning group, revealed that significantly more science classroom accidents occurred when either the number of students per class rose above 24 or the floor space per student dropped below 60 square feet. The first edition of the resulting book, the NSTA Guide to School Science Facilities, published in 1999, recommended a maximum class size of 24 and a minimum floor area per student of 60 square feet for high school lab/classrooms. This position has been adopted by NSTA.

Science teaching in the twenty-first century is considerably different

Biology Lab/Classroom

from the science teaching most of grew up on. The teacher no longer spends several class periods lecturing to students and then sending them to the lab on Thursday afternoons where they are given a recipe, tools and ingredients and expected to recreate the same experiment in two hours. Current practice is very much hands-on. A teacher may begin a class session by introducing a concept in a more or less traditional classroom setting, but then move quickly into a hands-on activity in a different area of the same room. Following this activity the class may reassemble in the “classroom” portion of the space for a discussion of the activity they’ve just experienced. It has been estimated that this “learning by doing” approach results in 40% more hands-on science experiences than the old, traditional lecture then lab format.

Another type of activity also often occurs in today’s science classes: the teacher poses question (“What impact might a new bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis have on the native flora and fauna in the area of the new bridge?” for example), then sends the class forth to answer the question. The students may be grouped in pairs, or in teams of four, say, and each team may head in a different direction to answer the question.

Small Group Meeting Room

Some may start by sitting down in a small group meeting room and planning their investigation, others might get on the Internet to determine what is already known about this subject. During the days and, possibly, weeks that follow, students may take field trips to the proposed site of the bridge, interview scientists at local universities, raise fish and subject them to the types of stresses they might encounter during construction, etc. As the project reaches its conclusion, the teams will document their findings and then present them to their classmates. The theory here is that people retain a small percentage of what they’re told, a slightly larger percentage of what they read, a much larger percentage of what they do, and a significantly greater percentage of what they teach.

You would be right to imagine that such an approach to science education could require much different facilities than those you experienced as a high school student. Combination laboratory/classrooms, which allow students to move between discussion and hands-on activities and back again, are now the primary learning spaces. Flexibility of furniture arrangement is critical. However, as many of the student activities and projects take more than a single class period, places to set up apparatus and leave it set up (project spaces) are needed. For safety, these spaces need to be

View Windeows in Prep Room

adjacent to the primary lab/classroom and to a corridor and should have large view windows between the project space and its surroundings to allow for supervision. The area of such project spaces is in addition to the recommended 60 square feet per student for the lab/classroom.
The size and location of prep and storage rooms are also critical to good and safe science instruction. These should be immediately adjacent to the lab/classroom with doors leading directly between the two. They should also have view windows into the adjacent lab/classroom for supervision when the teacher is in the prep area and students are in the lab/classroom (students should not be in the prep/storage area). The NSTA Guide to Planning School Science Facilities recommends a minimum of ten square feet per student for prep and storage space in addition to the space for the lab/classroom. Teachers should not have to haul materials and equipment through the corridors to a remote lab/classroom as this can easily constitute a safety hazard to all occupants of the school.
With energy conservation and sustainable design driving new construction, it is important to understand that both the location and equipping of the science facilities can have a major impact. Science facilities should have their own ventilation system so that the odors released by certain investigations are not recirculated throughout the school. Some science spaces require fume hoods which also need their own exhaust systems and, as a result, make-up air to replace the exhausted air. Fume hoods tend to be the biggest energy hogs in a science facility, both from basic operation in which they remove air from a science space which must be replaced and conditioned, and because many hoods are left operating 24/7. Minimizing the number of fume hoods, centralizing make-up air units, and centralizing the separate ventilation system required for science can save both energy and many dollars in the construction budget. Turning fume hoods off when not in use will save significant amounts in operating costs. Further, centralizing science centralizes the plumbing required including backflow devices and water heaters to temper water for the safety shower/eyewash units. In schools with smaller “schools within schools” or “house” designs, the science facilities can serve as the hub of a radiating scheme (see diagram).

Finally, science education doesn’t need to end at the door to the science lab/classroom. Many schools have extended science education throughout the school with such ideas as creating an astrometrics lab (elaborate sundial) in an entry tower, installing a water barometer in a stairwell, or retaining and enhancing an existing wetland as a teaching tool. One school in the Denver area has a resilient tile floor in a fractal pattern, another in St. Louis has paw prints of various animals set in a courtyard walkway, a school in the Boston area replaced several ceiling tiles with clear lexan and installed lights so that students could see the many hidden building systems above the ceiling.

Planners who understand these various factors can then begin to determine the appropriate cost of new or renovated science facilities before the bond issue is submitted for a vote. A typical history classroom may be only 900 square feet and will not have the specific casework and utility requirements of a science space. English classrooms will not require significant prep and storage spaces with casework and utility requirements, but science lab/classrooms will. In general, a science lab/classroom will cost about 3.4 to 3.75 times as much as a history classroom based on the additional area required and the cost of the casework, equipment and utilities required. This information must become part of the budgetary planning for science long before the bond issue is passed and construction begins.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS
In preparation for this article, the author researched published guidelines for high school science facilities. Unfortunately, much of what was found was not particularly encouraging. For example, New York State’s Building Aid Guidelines, updated in July 2004, require a minimum area of 1,000 square feet for high school science classrooms (including prep and storage space) for general and earth science and 1,200 square feet for biology, chemistry and physics spaces housing 24 students. The United Kingdom’s Designing and Planning Laboratories L14, dated March 2000 gives as “a useful rule of thumb” the allowance of 3 square meters (32.28 square feet) of “free floor area” per student of age 16 or more. I assume that “free floor area” does not include the space occupied by fixed casework and equipment. Ireland’s “General Design Brief for Post-Primary Schools,” published in February 2000, suggests 91 square meters (979 square feet) as appropriate for 24 students for “Science Laboratory & Preparation Area.” A “Typical Layout Plan of Science Laboratory Room” dated November 2006 from the Republic of the Philippines shows a 18 meter x 7 meter space (1,356 Square feet) housing 48 students, a “control room,” “storage” and two toilets (28.25 square feet per student total).

The unfortunate likely results of insufficient space and inadequate science facility design will be increased accidents caused by overcrowding and unsafe handling of materials and equipment, lawsuits in which board members, administrators and science teachers are accused of negligence, and less hands-on science education for our students.

A guide to planning adequate and safe science prep and storage spaces.

Central Prep & Storage Room

While more and more science teaching spaces are designed following the recommendations of the NSTA Guide to Planning School Science Facilities, as combined lab/classrooms sized for 24 students at 60 sq. ft. per person, prep and equipment and chemical storage spaces are often neglected and provided only in whatever space may be left over in the science area. These spaces may be the only science storage areas in a school, and thus serve the dual functions of prep space and storage space. When this occurs, and the space is undersized or improperly designed, prep space loses out to storage and unsafe conditions may result.

The NSTA Guide recommends that an additional 10 sq. ft. per student be provided for prep and storage; in other words 240 sq. ft. for support of a single lab/classroom of 24 students. Careful design of this space is critical to ensure that proper facilities are provided for storage, as well as plenty of counter space, sinks, and other equipment for safe preparation of materials for demonstrations and student investigations. Here are some guidelines for adequate and successful prep and storage spaces.

Storage should have its own, well-defined area with open shelving of various heights and widths, tall cabinets, open floor space, and other specialized storage equipment. Physical science storage may need peg-board areas on a wall to store long items such as air tracks, as well as open floor space for large, heavy items (physics teachers generally have a number of neat things to demonstrate physical phenomena such as unicycles, bowling balls, crossbows, etc.). Chemistry and biology need safe, well-designed shelving and cabinets for glassware and other equipment, plus separate, well-ventilated storage rooms for chemicals. Provide floor space, possibly

Provide storage for utility carts

underneath a counter, for the carts used to transport materials from the prep/storage area to the lab/classroom, and also for the storage of various safety apparatus, such as splatter or demo shields, that may not have a home in the lab/classroom. Field equipment, including nets, waders, shovels, seines, and other equipment that may become dirty, also needs a storage place. Some schools have provided separate “mud rooms” adjacent to biology and environmental science lab/classrooms with wall hooks for waders, bins or racks for nets and other gear, a floor drain, and a hose bibb for washing down muddy items.

For example, I own a 1995 Nissan Maxima that is probably the best made car I’ve ever owned. Since it now has 260,000 miles on it, the car came quickly to mind when I was looking for a simple, concrete example of life-

1995 Nissan Maxima

cycle costing to illustrate in this article. I paid $25,460 for this car, and that was only the beginning. I also paid nearly $3,000 in sales tax and for an extended warranty plan.

In the 11 years I’ve owned this wonderful car, I’ve paid more than $1,900 in taxes (registrations, inspections, and personal property taxes). Insurance on the car has totaled about $9,000. I estimate that my energy costs have been nearly $20,000, so far. Repairs and maintenance totaled more than $17,000. Had I financed the car over a period of three years at, say 10% per year, the interest cost would have been $3,000. The life-cycle cost of ownership of my Maxima has been $79,206.00, or 3.11 times the initial cost.

As with my Maxima, life-cycle cost of a real capital item is usually considerably greater than the initial cost. So it is with school construction. In the late 1950s and early 1960s my father was president of a suburban school board in New York. The accomplishment of which he was most proud was the planning and construction of a new high school – the first in this district. Unlike cars, schools have a long life span.
Most school construction in the late 1950s and 1960s was built to house the baby boomer generation. The mantra for school boards at the time was “get it built fast and cheap.” Typical buildings, such as the school my father helped to realize, had long, double-loaded corridors with interior and exterior bearing walls, large, single pane windows, flat roofs and no air conditioning. Heating and ventilation was accomplished by means of unit ventilators with either steam, hot water or electric heating coils. Through the decades these schools have not weathered nearly as well as the stouter construction prevalent in the 1930s. In 1995 the General Accounting Office estimated that the cost of renovating these baby boomer schools totaled over $112 billion.

In the early 1990s typical renovations to these schools involved closing up some window openings and replacing the single pane glass with insulating glass to reduce energy costs, replacing the unit ventilators with fan-coil units that provided both heating and air conditioning, and replacing leaky roofs. Often these renovations followed the same mantra of “get it done fast and cheap” with no thought given to an analysis of the life-cycle costs of these decisions. Science labs built with long, fixed benches and no “classroom” area often could not be renovated to the new National Science Education Standards because the narrow 22-24 foot clearance between exterior interior bearing walls was insufficient for a modern, flexible lab/classroom. New space was required.

The Missouri school building in the photograph was built in 1959, and is a single-story, double-loaded classroom structure. At the time of construction, most schools were not air conditioned and the heating and ventilation system consisted of unit ventilators on the outside walls, fed by

School with Rooftop HVAC Units

hot water generated in a central boiler. When this school was air-conditioned in 2000, the fastest and cheapest way to accomplish this goal was to replace the unit ventilators in each room with a roof-top unit which generated heat through a gas-fired furnace module and cooled the air through a direct expansion coil. Like a residential furnace and air-conditioning system, tempered (heated or cooled) air is circulated within the classroom below.
Such a solution certainly gets the job done, assuming that the job is to provide a relatively inexpensive system to heat and cool the classrooms below. However, the life-cycle cost of such a system will be significantly higher than some other possible solutions. One reason for this has to do with the large number of individual units involved: many motors offer many more opportunities for breakdowns and require lots of maintenance. Since each classroom now has a compressor and a fan, more electrical energy will be used to run these individual units than might have been used had a central system with one or two compressors and one or two large fans or pumps been selected. Other possible enhancements might have included a water-cooled system that could have cut the air conditioning costs by as much as 50% and heat recovery that uses the existing heat in the recirculating air to reduce the cost of heating and cooling code-required outdoor air.

The hot water system that originally heated these classrooms was a pretty efficient heating system when it was installed, since the residual heat in the finned pipes remained, even when the ventilation fans were not operating. Selecting a central system might have cost a little more in the design phase and, possibly, significantly more in the initial construction phase due to the need to run new piping and ductwork throughout the school, but these added costs could well have been recouped within five to eight years by energy savings alone. Rooftop units tend to have a useful life of 12-15 years, while central systems, especially with indoor equipment, tend to last 25-30 years and require significantly less maintenance. Thus, additional savings would accrue from reduced maintenance costs and longer system life.

Mike Swim, PE, a mechanical engineer, recently designed a ground source heat pump system for a project. Such a system replaces the normal furnace and cooling coils with a system of pipes either driven vertically into the ground or laid horizontally in a trench. Fluid circulates within these pipes and the constant temperature of the earth provides tempered water to the heat pumps for either heating or cooling. The buried pipe system cost significantly more than other systems to install, but, after conducting a life-cycle cost analysis which included the cost of energy and maintenance as well as the time value of money, the “free” energy and lower maintenance costs of the ground source heat pump system would recoup the added cost in 10 years (a 10% per year return on investment). And even better, the energy and cost savings keep accruing for the remainder of the useful life of the equipment.

Life-cycle costs of a school building begin when the initial planning and budgeting for the building begin. Logically, this is the best time to analyze these costs and the factors that influence them, and plan well so as to minimize them. Much like my Maxima, the initial construction cost of a school building is only a minor part of the lifetime ownership costs. In fact, with a building, the life-cycle costs (which also include energy costs, operations and maintenance, renovations, replacement of furnishings and equipment one or more times, and interest on construction funds) can exceed the construction cost by four to five times (see diagram).

Thorough planning and design will cost slightly more than limited planning and off-the-shelf design, but can it save significantly in life-cycle costs. For example, a well-planned and designed school can save energy costs while increasing the efficiency of employees and reducing absenteeism (a hidden cost rarely included in discussions of school facilities costs). A flexible structural system can make future modifications to layout easier and less expensive.
Terrazzo floors will last 50 to 100 years, requiring significantly less maintenance than resilient flooring.

An increasing number of school districts have been selecting architectural design teams on the basis of low fees. Most school projects are unique, in spite of the fact that they have many similarities. Researching and studying the best and most cost-effective solution for a school design takes time and effort. Since the design team is selling only the time and expertise of its employees, cutting fees reduces the amount of time that the team can spend on the project. Appropriate research and “thinking time” will not be given to a project with reduced fees, so the resulting design will likely not be the most imaginative nor the least expensive over the life of the building.
On the other hand, spending a little more on the design fees in the beginning could result in a much more efficient and flexible building. For example, daylighting and other sustainable design features might be incorporated, improving the health and performance of its occupants while reducing energy costs and helping sustain our environment. For a school building with an initial cost of, say, $10 million, the life-cycle cost could total as much as $50 million. If more thought in the design process could reduce this by 15 percent, the life-cycle cost savings could be $7.5 million. From the diagram accompanying this article, one can see how minuscule the design fees are in the big picture of life-cycle costs – often less than one percent of the total. This makes the additional up-front expenditure of $50-75,000, to get a more efficient and maintenance-free design, look like a pretty good investment.

The life-cycle cost of my Maxima could have been significantly higher had Nissan decided to “build it fast and cheap.” Few cars can boast of engines that still run well after 260,000 miles. Similarly, the school board that opts for paying a little more in initial costs will likely save themselves and the other taxpayers in the district hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in life-cycle cost. As stewards of the public’s investment, that would seem to be the appropriate thing to do and will reap rewards for decades.

Growing plants in a controlled environment such as a greenhouse can be a wonderful enhancement to any science program. Thoughtful planning, proper design, and faculty advocates who support the greenhouse as an

Greenhouse with ventilation system

important asset to their curriculums are necessary for a school greenhouse to be successful. This article discusses how to create a greenhouse at your school.

During the early planning stages of a project, before the budget is set and before the architect has located and designed the greenhouse, the faculty advocates need to identify how the greenhouse will be used in the science curriculum. Will large groups of students (e.g., a class of 24) be conducting activities in the greenhouse at one time? Will the greenhouse be available to students at times other than normally scheduled class periods? Will individual or small group projects be carried out in the greenhouse in addition to activities involving the entire class? What type of climate should the greenhouse maintain? (The Missouri Botanical Garden, for example, has several greenhouse structures: one maintaining the climate of a tropical rain forest, another of a desert, another of the Mediterranean coast.) What types of plants will students grow and what will happen to the plants during summer vacations? Will other faculty members, student groups, and staff have access to and use of the greenhouse?

A greenhouse facility can be a large, freestanding facility in which students experiment with manipulating crop mutations and cross-pollination; a

Greenhouse with interior shading

more modest space that is an integral part of the science department, surrounded by labs and classrooms; or simply an enlarged plant window that is extended out from the wall of a single lab/classroom to provide an area for living plants on a relatively small scale. Whatever the scale and location, design of the space is critical. Important design considerations include:

• orientation
• ventilation
• cooling and heating
• water supply and drainage
• lighting
• materials of construction and furnishings
• location

Computer on a cart

of space per computer to accommodate these carts. It also noted that some schools were moving toward using laptop computers. Schools spent thousands of dollars wiring their buildings so that computers could talk to each other and, eventually, to the Internet. Today, most school computers are laptops and most new installations have wireless networks.

Rapid technological advances such as these present a challenge to those renovating or building new classroom spaces. Anything we plan today may be obsolete in the one and a half to two years that it generally takes to get a building designed and built. Those involved with designing the space must know what technology is available, but more importantly, what technology will be available.

Cutting-edge technology such as interactive whiteboards, PDAs, and

"SmartBoard" presentation

BlackBerry-enabled cell phones are becoming more common in the classroom, but the following are also on their way:

A thin, wall-size, plasma screen, as described in Bill Gates’ book, The Road Ahead (1995), that serves as both an electronic whiteboard and multimedia center.

Tablet PCs for the teacher and students linked wirelessly to the plasma screen. Students could solve a problem from the comfort of their seats

Tablet-type laptop

without standing in front of the class, and the teacher could comment on the work in progress for all to see.

A holographic projector could allow students to walk through the chambers of the heart.

How then, should we plan for technology advances that we don’t have now, but probably will have by the time our buildings are complete? Mark Kesling, technology director for The Orchard School in Indianapolis, Indiana, uses the following process:

Decide what you want teachers and students to be able to do in the new

PDA with probe ware

space, and then budget for the technology you’ll need to make it possible.

Stay on top of what’s coming down the road (read industry magazines, talk to others involved with technology, attend relevant workshops, speak to equipment and software vendors and developers), but keep the brakes on until you are sure it will work. At the same time, use your imagination: Projecting a holographic image of the human heart may seem pretty far-fetched until you think about what a wonderful teaching tool this might be.

Adapt the technology plan as the new building and its spaces evolve and as the professional development of teachers progresses. The role of the tech person is to listen and then make recommendations throughout the process. All potential users should be queried, including students (who are usually further up the technology learning curve than we are). Listen to unlikely advisors: parents, construction workers, and custodians. Allow yourself the luxury of saying “I don’t know” and ask for help when needed.

Communicate the technology plan and its adaptations to all affected parties throughout the process. A small, seemingly insignificant decision can turn into a huge political nightmare if you don’t communicate properly throughout the process.

Virtual Keyboard

About six months out from the completion of the construction, the new technology equipment should be ordered. Money needs to be reserved for change orders like hanging brackets, cabling, and jacks that were missed or unanticipated during the planning process.

Following an imaginative, yet disciplined plan such as Mark’s can help assure that most of the technology you install will serve the needs defined by the users for the foreseeable future.

References

Biehle, J.T., L.L. Motz, and S.S. West. 1999. NSTA Guide to School Science Facilities. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association. Gates, B. 1995. The road ahead. New York: Viking.

This article originally appeared in the September 1, 2006 issue of Science Scope.

In a Denver school for the gifted, the architect included a fractal pattern in the resilient floor tile, generated by a mathematical program developed by a colleague. When the contractor had finished the floor, the architect found

Fractal Floor Pattern

two incorrectly installed tiles. The first was a mistake by the flooring contractor and was corrected; the second was the architect’s error in translating the results of the computer program. This one was left in place and the architect added a sign on the wall of the space describing fractal patterns, indicating that one tile in the pattern was incorrect, and offering a cash reward to the first student who could determine which tile was incorrect and explain why. This clever enhancement added nothing to the construction cost of the building.

During a renovation of a 1930s era school in St. Louis, the science teachers requested that a model of the solar system be included. A local model builder fabricated the planetary models and a local artist painted the Sun in

Suspended Planet Models in Solar System

a corner of the new science room. The planets were to one scale and their separation was at a different scale; the architect added a sign on the wall explaining the concept of scale and why two different scales were required for the solar system model. The total cost of this unique enhancement
was $1,500.

The danger of building your budget for school construction upon short-term, as opposed to long-term, costs is not academic theory.

The danger of building your budget for school construction upon short-term, as opposed to long-term, costs is not academic theory. As reports James T. Biehle, an architect and president of Inside/Out Architecture, Inc., of Clayton, Mo., schools all over the country are suffering the results of poor decisions by an earlier generation.

“What we’ve discovered during the past 10 years is that a significant amount of school construction is failing,” Biehle says. A lot of schools were built in the ’50s and ’60s to house the baby boomers, and a lot of today’s tendenciencies were the result of architects being told to get these schools built as fast and cheap as possible.”

Some of the problems now visible, notes Biehle, include flat roofs that are failing, rooftop HVAC systems that have outlived their useful life and need to be replaced, flimsy wall systems that are falling apart, and single pane windows that allow the inside heat to escape and the outside cold to enter. “What we see all over Missouri are rigid floor plans, with the bearing walls at the exterior and at the corridors,” says Biehle. “This means the spacing between the exterior wall and the corridor is 24 ft., which is rather narrow. It’s difficult to renovate these schools.”

One of the things known about any type of building, continues Biehle, is that the life-cycle costs can be four to five times the initial cost of the structure. “If you design and plan well, you can reduce these long-term costs anywhere from 10-25 percent,” says Biehle. “But you have to spend more time and money for the pre-design and design phases so the architect can develop strategies to reduce maintenance and future renovation costs.”