COVID-19 & the Future of Architectural Education

When it comes to designing K-12 schools and Higher Education projects, the design of flexible learning spaces has become important now more than ever. With the need to create additional breakout spaces for smaller groups or spread out meetings, utilizing spaces like media centers and atrium’s can create a great opportunity to leverage a new learning environment while still allowing students to gather and interact with appropriate social distance.

One of our finished projects, a new 3-story building and walkout full lower level for Stark State College in Akron, Ohio, presented much value to today’s current COVID-19 pandemic-based society. While this building was constructed in 2018, the functionality and efficiency of the facility and internal spaces are very prevalent. This design is comprised of classrooms, offices, collaboration spaces and faculty spaces, in which are all fit for proper social distancing.

Each floor plan shown presents the opportunity for properly distanced tables, desks and other stations. Likewise, each floor plan of every interior area designed is greatly versatile regarding movement and furniture layout change.

Additionally, we have an older finished project from 2016 that well represents an ideal interior layout for an educational facility. The project, a new facility for Streetsboro High School in Streetsboro, Ohio, consisted of 21st Century visioning services such as common areas, radio and TV stations, and STEM labs. These past modern additions have the versatility and capability today to be of safe value and use for social distancing purposes.

Educational spaces like common areas or classrooms are especially important in that the interior design can be segmented and spread out based upon social distancing needs, along with the interior providing quality air flow, all while being able to provide an efficient learning environment and interacting space. These types of prevalent architectural education designs will teach students, professors, other faculty, and any other people in the education industry how to adapt to safer practices that are expected to be long term everyday practices.

We at FMD are always prepared to take on a project and learn to adapt to new societal changes in the industry. We are interested about what we may collectively and newly consider as this unprecedented time in the world continues.