Modernist precedents
The Crow Island School, near Chicago, treated each classroom as a separate unit with strong links to the outdoors.In the years after World War II, Canada and the United States were transformed by a series of demographic and technological changes: the Baby Boom, the building of car infrastructure and suburbanization.
Enormous growth in the birth rate led to an equally large boom in school construction, particularly in new suburbs. Pedagogy and school architecture changed in tandem. New elementary schools reflected a less hierarchical, more child-centred approach to education, and many of them were being built on wide-open sites.
The need to build many schools, quickly, meant that many of these buildings were architecturally straightforward. At the same time they reflected new spatial and social ideas about education, influenced by the “whole child” approach put forward by the educator John Dewey. These ideas were reflected in Toronto classrooms: rooms whose smaller scale suited small bodies, and a spatial arrangement that allowed for group work and independent work.
In a 1942 article in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada journal, the prominent Toronto architect John B. Parkin argued for a “clean-cut and scientific approach to our post-war problems.”
New schools should be free of “antique garb,” he wrote, shaped by functional requirements. They should be should be designed to allow for easy expansion; they should support “’activity’ rather than ‘listening’.” And they should provide links to the outdoors.
Richard Neutra’s work on the Corona Avenue School (1935) in Los Angeles provided one a precedent for indoor-outdoor learning, with “outdoor classrooms.”
An outdoor classroom at Corona Avenue School, which set a precedent for North American schools.Parkin, a leading local architect, was certainly aware of the Crow Island School (1940) near Chicago. This was a collaboration between prominent Modernists: the Chicago firm of Perkins, Wheeler & Will, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen.
The local school board superintendent, an associate of John Dewey, asked the architects for a school that would “encourage spontaneity, variation, initiation, creative work and independent thinking.”
The result was a one-storey building in which each classroom had doors to a landscaped courtyard that faced a public park. Classrooms were L-shaped in plan; the smaller part of the L included a washroom and sink, so that students did not have to use communal washrooms and where kids could work with paint, food, and dirt.
The Crow Island school was a clear model for Toronto’s elementary schools, starting as early as 1943.