Campus og studiemiljø - Bygningsstyrelsen

Learning was to take place in rooms resembling
those of the factory. In reality, a school
or a university was a sort of learning factory.
Karl Marx considered the factory a model
for learning. Schools for the children of
ordinary people had started emerging, and
learning had to be organised. Slowly, most
industrialised societies saw the birth of
school systems with an open and free offer of
teaching and learning. Schoolrooms became
classrooms, and with the advent of democracies,
the population at large started stressing
the need to complete schooling, even compulsory
education and learning. The great
Victorian institutions were established: hospitals,
museums, schools and universities.
Often, they were built as huge Gothic castles
or as Renaissance palaces. Those were the
two eras that were held in highest esteem. As
Functionalism arrived after World War I, the
focus on the factory as an ideal grew even
greater. The home was a factory of living
and the school was a factory of learning. The
most famous example of a learning space
built in the deep shadow of the factory is the
Bauhaus in Dessau by the architect Walter
Gropius. The ideal here was for learning to
take place in workshops, and these were
manned by both theorists and practicians.
Study equalled work, and work equalled
learning. The buildings might as well have
been used for a machinery factory. When
the Bauhaus due to Nazism and the end of
World Word II ended up in the USA, it was
established south of the centre of Chicago
on a campus of learning buildings designed
by Mies van der Rohe. The shielded yard of
the monastery and its cloister are replaced
by transparent pavilions spread across a
park-like landscape. They reflect openness
towards the world and towards each other.
Light and air in the home of the 1930s have
become light and air in learning. Learning is
not the in-depth studies of the individual but
associated with a busy network of people in
ongoing interaction.
From the middle of the 1960s, universities
came into being based on a combination of
problem-based learning and project work.
This required completely new ways of planning
buildings. A space for each project
group. Learning happened in a village of
small learning spaces, each a framework for
all the processes connected to the project
organisation: formulation of purpose and
the problem to be studied, division of labour,
research and writing, production of a report,
and finally the exam as a conversation
between group, supervisor and examiner.
Still others were inspired by the brand new
technological possibilities. Buildings can be
large, open and flexible, as we know it from
trade fair and congress centres, and they can
be equipped with advanced types of technological
infrastructure, first and foremost
connected to information and communication
technology.
Today, new learning forms are surfacing.
Listening, reading and discussing remain
incredibly important, but can take place
in new ways. New forms based on games
may be introduced and supported by the
vast possibilities offered by technology. The
learners now have to create their own learning
space. They are given options and tools,
and the idea of ‘learning by doing’ takes on a
tre stemmer: undervisere / tHree voiCes: teaCHers
“ det er afgørende for fremtidens læringsrum,
at der er plads til både den personlige fordybelse
og den intense sociale interaktion / it is crucial
to the learning spaces of the future that they
allow space for both personal in-depth study and
intense social interaction
completely new dimension. You only learn,
if you can create the framework and the
content within which your own learning is
to unfold. The central aspect of learning may
even become the establishment and breaking
of this framework. This may even be the
case in the first job you get after graduation.
The requirement for innovation in the work
is on the increase, and learning is now seen
as an essential form of value-creation. Learning
is a sort of curriculum to be mastered but
also transcended. Work takes on the character
of learning and is associated with ever
more reflection and conceptualisation of the
experience gained, just as learning happens
through interaction with others. It is crucial
to the learning spaces of the future that they
allow space for both personal in-depth study
and intense social interaction.
So, what can we learn from history? We can
see that there have been many forms, and
that we have a wide selection, which can
stimulate our pedagogical imagination. We
have to both transcend what has taken place
until now and take something with us. The
learning spaces of the future may be a combination
of monastery, manor house and
factory. We must make tradition and vision
interact, turn identity, in-depth study, flexibility
and interaction into living, pedagogical
opportunities.
Today, there is no connection between
space and the knowledge about what learning
is. Instead, the universities’ spaces are
based on societal ideals. E.g. introverted
monasteries, gaudy manor houses, efficient
factories or decentralised housing estates.
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