Subject : TEAR DOWN THE SCHOOL

   Think of the school as a building. A condemned building, a pile of bricks, steel girders flamecut and stocked on a flatbed, oak beams with chipped plaster stuck on them, a stack of cracked glass, an inventory of materials, a list. It’s shut, all the doors and windows boarded over with plywood, it’s an empty shell, a salvage site, a fixed amount, an invoice.

Okay, so it used to be a building, a set of functions given specific form. There was a glassceilinged atrium supported by steel beams; a mezzanine space supported by cast-iron columns; a windowed gallery; a shop; classrooms of course. I’m already forgetting what else, and finally it isn’t that important. It was a bunch of specific values materialized as a building, and now the building is gone.

In the early 1970s Native American activists were responsible for as many as 200 occupations of U.S. Federal buildings. The most famous of these was the 19-month takeover of the abandoned maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island, an event that led to significant concessions from President Nixon, including the repeal of the official Indian termination policy and the move towards an era of tribal self-determination. The occupation, started by a small group of protesters who spontaneously claimed the island “by right of discovery” eventually transformed the prison into a home for as many as 80 people-- a clinic, a school, a nursery, bedrooms on death row. The Alcatraz occupiers didn’t effect any permanent changes to the prison—the few wooden buildings on the island were burnt down shortly before the protesters were evicted, and the cell blocks retain some faded graffiti today—but they succeeded in transforming a useless building into a symbolic object, and then into a housing block, and finally into the means to Native autonomy and self-determination. A prison that became a home.

The function of a building is never really defined as a matter of design; it’s defined by how we use it, what it gets used for. Think of design as a lifestyle, think of it as a mental frame, a struggle, a physical process, a mode of habitation, an occupation. Think of the school as a home; move in, live there.