Reconnecting High School Students To Community Life Through Friendlier Landscape Design
September 4, 2003
University Park, Pa. -- Public school officials do themselves no favors regarding the potential for student violence by perpetuating master plans for school campuses with stark landscapes and buildings that isolate students from surrounding communities, a Penn State graduate student researcher says.
In an award-winning project that places high school shootings in the context of poor suburban planning -- especially in how outdated notions of keeping order among students are reflected in school campus designs -- Benjamin A. Shirtcliff suggests that today’s emphasis on security-conscious barriers between schools and their neighborhoods only makes matters worse.
Shirtcliff is working on his Penn State master’s thesis in landscape architecture while living in Madison, Wis. He admits that land value considerations and the preference of local officials to keep sometimes-rowdy youngsters at a distance from residential areas can limit options for campus design and location. However, he says that the benefits of reconnecting students to the life of the community through open, creative landscaping in new and existing sites would be manifold.
“Suburban educational institutions separate adolescents from the realm of everyday life in a fixed location that alienates them from an entire world of activity and asserts specific competitive structures of success,” says Shirtcliff. “In contrast, urban schools provide youths with opportunities to meet people, go places and pursue activities that are personally fulfilling outside the educational system -- advantages that suburban youths without a car may never enjoy.
“In the most ‘openly’ designed schools, the ability of the student body to alienate ‘losers’ disappears because individuals can better pursue their own self interests beyond the school setting.”
Shirtcliff won a first place prize for individual research for his paper, “Landscape/Order,” on the topic in the American Society of Landscape Architects’ 2002 Student Design Competition. His forthcoming thesis, “When the ‘Placeless’ Landscape is Home: Design Patterns to Improve Suburban Adolescent Dwelling,” under the direction of Eliza Pennypacker, professor of landscape architecture at Penn State, expands on the earlier project to suggest how landscape architects can adapt new and existing suburban developments to meet the needs of teens.
Calling typical suburban school campuses environments in which “severe feudalism” and intolerance to change can be witnessed, Shirtcliff advocates for new, open architecture and landscape architecture styles to alleviate the psychological effects of dismal current practices. A soulless archetype of long, windowless corridors, semi-barren landscapes and a withdrawal of the building from the street is well in place in standard school design, he says.
“All of these elements ensure that nothing can happen unseen by those in charge,” Shirtcliff notes. “The student is stranded on an island amongst a sea of agricultural fields, sub-divisions and residential areas -- away from places of commerce, industry and cultural offerings.
“Removing this compartmentalization of landscapes would allow schools to overlap and integrate with other community institutions, and students to interact with their surroundings in a more frequent and mentally healthy manner. The single, all-encompassing school facility could ultimately be abandoned rather than try to encompass within its walls an entire world of experience that’s prepackaged for students.”
Shirtcliff’s adviser for the award-winning paper was Daniel Nadenicek, formerly of the landscape architecture faculty at Penn State and now chair of the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Clemson University in South Carolina. Before joining the four-year combined bachelor’s/master’s degree program in landscape architecture at Penn State, Shirtcliff in 1999 earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Oregon, where he wrote a thesis on social reactions to high school shooting incidents.
To download “Landscape/Order” in pdf format, visit http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/b/a/bas306/ben/Landscape.Order.pdf
**gwc**