018 School Design
As part of my work at the office of education secretary Jesli Lapus, I was asked to meet with this person about a proposal regarding school building and classroom design.
It was a task that interests me a lot, owing to my love of anything architecture and design, and even more so, owing to my belief that design of the learning space has so much impact on the learner’s ability to learn. So despite the short notice, together with a colleague from our comms unit, I met the guy at the education secretary’s conference room.
The proposal was out of the ordinary (which I liked). And now, over a decade after, I still can’t decide if it’s more innovative or more ambitious—it’s certainly both (which I liked).
One would expect that the guy would have a new design for school buildings and/or classrooms, right? He did not. As far as I know, he’s not even an architect.
Instead, he was proposing that we, the education department, host an international competition on school building design.
He came with a brief outline of what he had in mind. There were categories. There were guidelines. The major schools of architecture in the country would be tapped for judging. And so on and so forth.
We liked his idea, for sure.
Definitely, we thought that it would give us at the education department some guidance on how to improve existing classroom designs (which, as everyone knows, are as spartan as it can get, primarily because of budget constraints). This competition may amount to school designs that can really advance school architecture in the country.
My only concern, however, was that the competition may have little or no value for Philippine public schools simply because the proposed competition did not take into account the construction cost.
I therefore explained this matter to the proponent, emphasizing the fact that government procurement is based mainly on cost, where the cheaper option wins (almost all the time).
I also suggested that the proposed competition would still work, the Philippines and any other third world country can still benefit from this, if he adds a separate category for designs below a particular cost threshold.
This way, the competition could still judge the best designs in the planet, but at the same time, it could now judge the best designs that are for the third world market, including our own.
Nothing came out from this discussion. The guy never came back. Perhaps he didn’t like the fact that we had other ideas? I wouldn’t know.
All I know is that it would be great to bring the best designers in the world to design schools and classrooms for us, given our unique physical, geographical, environmental, sociocultural, and of course, financial considerations. Needless to say, the best designs should make schools and classrooms conducive to learning.