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In the UK our prisons often look nicer than our (state) schools. Many of our prisons are quite ancient, whereas many of our state schools are 1960s monstrositie

• layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  It’s unfair to compare CLASP [1] buildings with centuries old stone buildings... The CLASP system was a stopgap measure for cost-effectively building schools for the baby boomer generation given the economic constraints of post-WW2 Britain. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consortium_of_Local_Authorities_Special_Programme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consortium_of_Local_Authorit...
  • KingMachiavelli 6y ago
    And given the purpose of a school, building it cheaply is very utilitarian as it allows you to build schools faster. I would rather have the institution be more effective than more pleasing to look at.
  • AbrahamParangi 6y ago
    It doesn't look bad because it's cheap, it looks bad because it's inhuman.
    • baud147258 6y ago
      inhuman is a strong word just to talk about schools that were built on the cheap, especially schools that, at the time of constructions, were required because there wasn't enough schools building available.
    • pmyteh 6y ago
      There's nothing inhuman about any of the three school pictures here. They're built to a human scale (not too tall, decent amounts of internal room), have generous numbers of windows, and are set in outdoor space with grass and trees. There are, on the other hand, lots of practical problems with this kind of building. The flat roofs have a tendency to leak, they're decades past their design life, thermal control is poor, they're riddled with asbestos, and a number of other issues. And lots of people think they're ugly. But this doesn't make them inhuman, just a flawed solution to a real-world problem. I think it's easy to forget just what difficulties the UK was in for building in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a spectacular shortage of housing (a baby boom and the effects of WW2 bombing didn't help) and a chronic shortage of both money and skilled labour for building. There is, bluntly, no way that enough traditional brick and stone buildings could have been put up for there to be enough schools. So you can certainly argue that better cheap and/or mass produced buildings should have been made, or that the aesthetics were bad, but writing off all the architecture without understanding its context is unhelpful. [Edit: in my view, the most inhuman feature of the images is the fencing, but that is almost certainly not original - security in schools was really stepped up from the 1990s onwards]
• tomc1985 6y ago
  Aww, I had grown to like that style of architecture while I was living abroad (in Holland, not England, but there was a lot of similarly built structures out in the suburbs where I lived) It doesn't age particularly well, though
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• agumonkey 6y ago
  monstrosties is a strong word, they're cheap and functional (and anything but pretty, everybody agrees). I grew up in these (both kind, classical and industrial actually) and nobody really cared.
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  The outside of prisons look nicer. Visitors entrances often look pretty so non-incarcerated people and local officials are presented with an inoffensive facade that's not dissimilar to a modern business or institutional reception area. Conditions in the rest of the building may be appalling, but generally nobody is allowed to take pictures of that.
• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I find most building in the UK to be either extremely futuristic (think London modern skyscrapers) and out of space, concrete blobs or houses with brick facades. That's subjective, but I can't say I like any of them
• mhh__ 6y ago
  I concede that modernist architecture hasn't aged particularly well, but I grew up in a fairly deprived area of the UK (Torbay) and all the schools are in fairly good condition. The worst one I visited was a private one, even. Point being that you can cherry pick any answer