What’s truly important in school design is not the architecture: it’s what goes on within the walls, the community the school embodies and how it supports young people and teachers in learning.
School Stories is the result of more than two decades of school design work by Jestico + Whiles. We will soon be completing our hundredth school. A milestone, representing many thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people, but most importantly resulting in quality learning environments for over 180,000 young people and their teachers.
We usually talk about post-occupancy evaluation and the need to do more of it. Inherently this is often based on metrics: examining the physical performance of the building, the environment, the data. With School Stories, we wanted to capture something different. Each year, each term, each day, there are thousands of experiences – stories – playing out within the buildings we have designed.
We recorded a fraction of those stories by revisiting a selection of our schools to hear directly from their communities, in their own words, through audio and video testimony. These vignettes offer a glimpse into the lives unfolding within every one of our schools.
Unashamedly unscientific, yet thoroughly affirming, School Stories has captured why all of us involved in school design are motivated to do what we do.
