Fabrication + Adaptation: A System for Replacing Elementary School Portable Classrooms Throughout California

Abstract

Thirty percent of California public school facilities are made of portable buildings. Portable classrooms are uninspiring and inadequate spaces for learning, reflective of a cultural indifference for the education of California's youth. Children should be engaged and connected to learning from a young age to maximize their opportunities for success through the course of their lives. Portable classrooms are intended to be a fast and simple short-term solution to a growing population, but are almost always used long beyond their anticipated lifespan. Portable buildings are unresponsive to their site and climatic conditions, typically lined up in a row on the fringe of an existing school. California needs a system of rapidly deployable but long-term classrooms to replace elementary school portables throughout the state. The classrooms are designed to foster a greater sense of community while maximizing the environmental conditions required for healthy learning spaces. The classrooms are able to respond to the variety of environmental conditions that occur throughout the state, as well as their local school infrastructure. This thesis proposes to address the long overdue issue of replacing elementary school portable classrooms throughout the state of California by utilizing digital technology and prefabrication techniques to design classrooms that are adaptable to the diverse climates within the state. The classrooms will offer ample natural daylighting, cross-ventilation and other environmental strategies that are beneficial to learning. There are three classroom prototypes to show how the building form can respond to its climatic conditions, though the tectonics of the buildings remain the same. Two typical school site conditions represent strategies for replacing existing school portables relative to existing school layouts, and one condition depicts how the classroom unit could be used to create a new school entirely.