Sabrina Summer

‘To better understand how social inequality is reproduced through the educational system, one must also consider the materials, spatial concepts, practices and the symbolic culture of the school, in a word: the physicality and the architecture of education.’  

- Thomas Alkemeyer, The physicality of Education: On the silent power of symbolic violence, 2008

Educational institutions, a place where hegemonic systems are reproduced, supporting a culture of compliance and standardisation!

The project aims at not following but finding a way to challenge those given power structures. What would happen if you tear down the fence around schools? Eliminating the fortress-like character, suggesting an openness to its surroundings and rather acting as a ‘nourishing agent’?

Against this backdrop, in the specificity of Community Secondary Schools & Sixth Form, I am exploring possibilities to provoke and celebrate difference. It is very much about ‘not fitting-in’, investigating a plurality of forms that offer a heterogeneous student body diverse opportunities to connect. My interest is to show the potential for opening up a dialogue, a dialogue between the existing built environment, and its users. I am working between furniture and infrastructure, where the wider picture and ‘micro-situations’ come together. The dispersed physicality, suggests an unfolding of the boundaries between private and public, parents and pupils, re-shuffling divisions between exterior and interior. School not manifested as an island of discipline and order but acting as an engaging, accessible platform, for the community!