Call this a cautionary tale about 'rethinking' school design. The high school I went to was designed/built in 1973 by some people who "re-thought" school desig

Call this a cautionary tale about 'rethinking' school design. The high school I went to was designed/built in 1973 by some people who "re-thought" school design. Their idea was a 'flexible learning space' - basically a giant open-plan area where different classes would just sort of sit in circles in one big room. Certain rooms - the library, admin offices, the science labs - were walled off individually but most general classes would just be in this big open space. Teachers were assigned rolling desks with a locking roll-top that they could move around to whatever spot on the floor their class would be in that day, kids would circle the desks around and creativity would thrive (or something...) This plan was basically a disaster. Getting a bunch of teenagers to focus on a lesson is hard enough without the distraction of dozens of other classes within visible/audible range. Within the first year they retrofit the whole building with walls to break the big open space up into conventional classrooms. The walls were vinyl panels stretched between the structural columns - if you pressed on them, they would flex noticeably. It worked well enough, but one side effect of the late addition of walls was that the HVAC had been designed for one big room with a few 'zones' of control. When all the vinyl walls went in, they didn't align to the 'zones' so there would be a thermostat in one room, but the heat/AC vent(s) would be in other rooms, leading to some classrooms constantly being too-hot or too-cold. 20 years after this (the '90s, when I attended) there was still one room filled with the long-unused rolling desks with locking roll-tops.