The Architecture of Learning: Space, Time, and Pedagogy in the Open Space School

This article considers the open space schools of the 1960s and 1970s as both a spatially distinctive architectural typology and the environmental component of child-centered learning. Emphasis is placed on, but not limited to, the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of hostility to conventional children’s education in terms of both pedagogy and spatial setting. The impact of this context is examined. The initial embrace and subsequent rejection of the open space school by the mid-1970s are contrasted with the more receptive response in western Europe and especially the Scandinavian countries. In the latter setting, this approach has been embraced by both public and private sectors, and is described along with the open space school’s instrumentalization into globalized capitalism by the 2000s, when the very characteristics that the open space school and its pedagogy sought to inculcate in its students (digital technology-literate, collaborative, independent problem-solvers) were seen as the skills needed by an emerging class of “knowledge workers” on whom the globalized corporations of the contemporary world depend.