Word: forum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Codes. The more progressive school boards that do look for new designs are often hampered by outmoded building codes. Some states still insist that windows be placed only on one wall. Regulations for ceiling heights, says the FORUM, are often "predicated on ventilating theories proved erroneous...
...educators and architects have long been agreed on at least one point: the nation needs new schools. But, said ARCHITECTURAL FORUM this week, "it is a sad-and little recognized-fact that the pitifully inadequate supply of taxpayer's dollars is, in most big U.S. cities, being spent for the wrong kind of schools." To show what it meant, the FORUM devoted its entire October issue to the U.S. school...
...example of poor planning the FORUM picked New York City. The big town has 900 school buildings and a third of them are more than 50 years old. In this antiquated group 280 buildings are not fire-safe, and 250 have inadequate plumbing. In many neighborhoods now heavily populated by new housing projects there are no schools at all. But some schools are now much too big; their neighborhoods have shrunk as population shifted...
...Numbers. The trouble is, says the FORUM, that New York makes no provision for changes in population. Most of its schools are planned by the Board of Education's Construction Bureau, which sticks by its oldtime architects and methods. As one former bureau architect put it: "When a program for a new school came through, we used to riffle through the drawers, find something that looked suitable, and accomplish the tremendous design job of changing the numbers on the old plan...
...result, says the FORUM, is that "New York is putting millions of dollars into 1,000-pupil elementary schools -many of them in areas where [population analysis] raise serious doubt as to permanency of need. They are all built to last at least 50 years, but they show scarcely a trace of the design revolution of the last two decades...