Quality and Learning Spaces

This study is being conducted by the Halifax team of the SSHRC Partnership Grant project Quality in Canada's Built Environment: Roadmaps to Equity, Social Value and Sustainability (QCBE). While awards for quality in architecture and design have proliferated in the last 20 years, little is known about how design quality relates to end user experience. Architects and designers may consult prospective users during the design process but are seldom able to return to their projects once they are built for more than a cursory post-occupancy evaluation.

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Our team is exploring quality in schools that have received design awards. Schools are crucial institutions in society and rightly attract much scholarship on curriculum and pedagogy, but little research has investigated the spatial dimensions of learning environments (Walden 2015). We want to explore the relationship between ‘quality’ in design and ‘quality’ of use-value and experience. Have design intentions in awarded schools been fulfilled or subverted in practice?

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