“The classrooms… They’re boring and I like lunch.”

Have you ever tried to explain your studio project to a high schooler anyone outside of architecture? If you have, you understand the profound agony of realizing you’re basically full of it (most of the time). A similar sense of painful (and sometimes revelatory) enlightenment comes from reading Metropolis’ post-occupancy study of Coop Himmelb(l)au‘s Central Los Angeles High School No. 9.

From “unnecessary,” to “elegant,” to “a dream in outerspace,” click through for more 16-year-old reactions to so-called “high design.”

Metropolis POV’s Martin C. Pedersen initiated the post-occupancy study earlier this year, after getting in contact with the executive architects on the project. He distributed a question and answer sheet to each of the school’s students and teachers, and the results are written up in Starchitecture High.

Many of the short-answers to the quizes are biting (after all, we’re talking about high schoolers being asked to do extra work). For example, when asked to complete the sentence “If I were the architect of this building, I would have ________,” one student responded with a snarky “I would have checked my mental state,” while another said the building reminded him of “a PRISON! School is PRISON!”

Yet, the surveys do illuminate some really fascinating things about the gap between architect and user, as well as some revealing observations. Says one French teacher:

I know the district was criticized heavily for spending—I think it was upward of $230 million on the school. But I look at the buildings and think, “That’s about a quarter of what it costs to make a B-1 bomber.” And for the price of a B-1 bomber we could have built four of these. And there are a lot more future taxpayers and creativity and productivity coming out of here than a jet fighter.

Post-occupations studies are, as Metropolis notes, rarely performed. Yet as the profession drifts further and further away from economic sustainability (or relevance), they may be a key to finding the way back Towards a New Architecture.

Here’s a sampling from the surveys, which can be found over at Metropolis.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in quotable quotes required reading

tagged Coop-Himmelb(l)au, High School, LOL, post-occupancy study

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