BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

assignments, etc.(l) Thus education is integrated into urban life. Even
older school buildings, which dropping birth rates in industrialized countries
are leaving redundant and empty, are being taken over by citizen
groups as community and arts centers. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, citizens
from communities and neighborhoods participated in the development of a
metropolitan "networks" map interrelating cultural facilities to schools,
and identifying how redundant school space could be used as centers for
arts, social activities, ecology centers, and so forth, in relation at
once to neighborhood needs and to the physical interrelationship of each
center with other centers and resources on the "networks" map.(2)
45. When we examine the programs which are offered in these deinstitutionalized
facilities, we find some common trends. The Human Resources
Center in Pontiac is open eighteen hours a day. It offers education from
kindergarten to college degrees, from mid-career workshops to seminars and
workshops for new careers, from theater and music to hobby shops for the
elderly, from cookery to basketball, open to everyone of any age or sex,
and entered from the street. In the Queensgate II Town Center, the citizens
have asked for indoor spaces which can be occupied "spontaneously"
by any group, for music, lectures, or meetings, on an "as available" basis.
Like Pontiac, one of the programmes requested by the citizens is a community
museum, to document and celebrate the social, political and popular
cultural history of the neighborhoods which surround the Town Center; and
in a similar way to the educational facilities, the museum is to be entered
directly from the public square. In all of these projects what emerges
are urban design and architectural forms responding to the themes of coordination
and inter-sectoral policies which the citizens themselves have
defined in joint planning and design sessions with the architects and the
1) Metro/education is based on the rapid transit system, the Metro, of
Montreal. At every concourse there is a different inventory of resources
within walking distance. Every concourse can become a subcenter,
a node, within an overall system of learning resources. As
Harry Parnass, one of its planners, perceives the system, Metro/education
capitalizes on the fact that the metro is "a sophisticated network
of climate-controlled pedestrian concourses...which integrates
office, shopping, cultural, and residential facilities" into a single
system linked by rapid rail services. The system is therefore ideal
as a discovery learning network, the home bases for which need not be
in schools at all but could be located in office blocks, libraries, institutions,
in spaces over shops, or in any other suitable available
space along the system. Michel Lincourt and Harry Parnass, Metro/
Education, University of Montreal, 1970.
2) Urban Design Associates, Education Plan for Ann Arbor, Michigan,
Vol. Ill, 1973.
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