The school's beating heart
Three elementary schools by leading architects around the year 1980
J. Sterrenburg (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
A Broekhuizen – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / A)
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Abstract
Life is an ever-evolving process, over time new ideas are born and offer new possibilities and approaches to handle familiar problems or processes differently. This is also the case for educational buildings and the architectural ideas that they represent, especially in the social and interactive realm.
The school’s beating heart focuses on the central hearts of three elementary school buildings, built around the year 1980, designed by Jan Verhoeven, Herman Hertzberger, and the Architects firm Van den Broek & Bakema. This thesis in particular addresses the way these central hearts evoke social interaction through their architecture and unravels the ideas of the architects on social interaction in the bigger context of educational and architectural thinking during the time the projects were designed. This resulted in the research question that takes a central place in this thesis: What are the ideas of the architects of ‘t Ronde, Apolloschools, and De Schalm on meeting in the schools and how do the school buildings evoke social interaction?
This thesis is structured by exploring the greater context of Dutch education and Western thoughts on the structuralist architectural movement and formulating their main points of focus and concepts. These points are used to analyze the three elementary school buildings in an individual way, which allows the buildings to be compared in an equal way. The thesis concluded by stating that all schools have similar concepts and ideas behind their designs, but that the outcome of the school buildings is largely affected by the organizations that initiated the design and their philosophy on education.