THE VALUE AND BENEFITS OF GOOD ARCHITECTURE FOR SCHOOL FACILITIES

Good architecture brings benefits to people both as individuals and as communities. These benefits are both practical and cultural and have value both for our present and our future. Good, well designed buildings enhance and enrich their occupant's activities and lives and promote their well?being and health; make a positive contribution to the urban fabric; sustain and protect the environment and minimize the impact of people's activities; and provide an opportunity for sound investment. Indifferent buildings, on the other hand, frustrate and inhibit their occupant's activities and impoverish their lives; adversely affect their occupants' health and demean the spirit; cut across the existing grain and pattern of cities; pollute the environment and consume non?renewable resources; and are costly to operate, repair and maintain. But above all, because they occupy land and shape our activities and environment for a considerable time, poor quality buildings waste opportunity. As a City, we need good buildings. We need the social, cultural, environmental and economic benefits that good architecture and good building design can bring.

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF ARCHITECTURE

GOOD BUILDING DESIGN AND GOOD ARCHITECTURE AFFIRM SOCIAL VALUES AND BRING COHERENCE AND ORDER TO OUR BUILT ENVIRONMENTS FOR THE BENEFIT OF US ALL

The essential purpose of all buildings is to provide for the many and changing needs of society. Such as the need for schools, that provides an opportunity for good education. Our primary expectation for all our buildings is that they should be practical and efficient. They should be adequate for their purpose and suitably planned. They should provide a healthy environment, provide warmth, light, and shade. They should be free from defects, robust and easy to maintain. They should be flexible and accessible to all. These are the requirements and benefits of good building. But architecture is more than good building. Architecture seeks to find solutions to the practical and functional problems of building that affirm and reflect timeless human values and to do so in ways, which are pleasing, elegant and give delight. Architecture is about ideas and ideals given shape in built form.

Architecture seeks to provide environments in which people can live and work more enjoyably and efficiently and which encourage social and working communities to flourish. Through good, imaginative design we can provide schools that meets the needs of students, teachers, staff, parents and others, which creates opportunities for encounter and social interaction and which strengthens community life. We can provide places of education that support good teaching, encourage concentration and are good places to study and learn. We can make places of teaching and places of learning which make even the simplest task a pleasant experience and which encourage us to imagine new ways of carrying out and managing our activities. And we can make schools that provide a focus for, and are potent symbols of, our collective aspirations.

Buildings and the built environments they shape, provide a framework, which subtly confines, organizes and colors all our lives for better or for worse. For many, their built environment often does not meet even the simplest of their needs; the need for a decent home, access to local amenities and open space, a pleasant and stimulating place to work, to learn, opportunities for leisure, and fresh air and a quiet, clean and safe environment. Our ability to meet these needs, to meet our social objectives for an inclusive society that provides opportunity for all, largely depends on the quality of the built environments we make. And good building design is a fundamental and key determinant of that quality. Good building design and good architecture affirm social values and bring coherence and order to our built environments for the benefit of us all.

THE CULTURAL VALUE OF ARCHITECTURE

Good architecture has not only a social but also a cultural value. At best, architecture is an art, a happy synthesis of the demands of technology and function, of climate and site and of social and cultural needs and aspirations. We can, then, experience and enjoy architecture as an art and that experience and enjoyment can be on a number of levels. A building may give us practical satisfaction in the way it fulfills its purpose, in its arrangement of function, in the efficiency of its services and in the skills evident in its assembly and detail. It may give us aesthetic pleasure in the means by which it achieves its ends, its disposition of form and space, its use of light, texture, material, color and the quality of its craftsmanship. Or it may engage us intellectually or emotionally in the way it resonates with cultural symbol and meaning.

But architecture has a deeper cultural value. Architecture both shapes and is shaped by the society and place in which it is made. The architecture and buildings of our cities are a repository of our common culture and heritage, they provide continuity and a unique sense of history and tradition. The making of buildings, the act of design and the creation of architecture gives us an opportunity to connect with this past, to assert our present cultural values and to say something about who we are at this time and in this place.

Architecture inevitably reflects a particular moment in time in terms of taste and technique. Good architecture, however, also reflects that depth of experience that comes from an understanding of local issues and of the timeless qualities of culture and community. The cultural value of architecture lies in its ability to respond to these deeper sensibilities and to the tangible realities of place and to make connections with and enhance the specifics of culture and location. The challenge for our architecture today is to fuse what is still vital in local tradition with the best of our increasingly global civilization, to marry them in new ways that meet our modern needs and aspirations.

Submitted by Gary Russell, Architect, as a position for defining the need for good architecture.