In 1973, my highschool, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural traits of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one in every of its wings did not have doors. The rooms opened up directly onto the hallway, and tidbits about the French Revolution, say, or Benjamin Franklin’s breakfast, would drift from one classroom to another. Distracting at finest and frustrating at worst, broad-open school rooms went, for essentially the most half, the way of different sick-thought-about architectural fads of the time, like concrete domes. (Following an eighty-million-dollar renovation and growth, in 2005, none of the new wings at A.B.R.H.S. have open lecture rooms.) Yet the workplace counterpart of the open classroom, the open office, prospers: some seventy per cent of all places of work now have an open floor plan.
Once every part is embellished the ultimate … Read more
