I’ve been struck by what’s always the most striking recently – the obvious. I get to visit quite a number of new schools and whatever their architectural merits, there is commonality on the large extent of glazing to classrooms.

And so it should be, surely. But almost without exception each school has had its blinds down, lights on and overhead projector purring, and not just on sunny days. How much sky does get seen in a day at school I wonder? It’s no new phenomenon, but its persistence troubles me.

There are two aspects to this problem: the technical and the cultural.  We must provide a technical solution that responds both to different external conditions (namely the weather and time) and changeable internal demands (from looking at a projection on a screen to a book at a desk) that is operable within a particular behavioural culture. So on the one hand big windows, blinds and light switches seem an eminently reasonable, simple solution to the technical requirements, maybe even throwing in brownie points for ‘user control’ too. But it’s here that it falls short, as it assumes both a level of active engagement with our environment that is just not there, as well as a degree of tolerance for variable conditions (ranging from a bit dim to a bit bright) that we don’t accept. 

We actually tolerate some pretty unpleasant environments when we’re busy focused on a task.  It happens daily in our office too.  It’s a sunny morning so the blinds get closed.  It’s a cloudy afternoon and the blinds are still firmly shut.  And we’re environmentally aware architects!  But we’re as busy and as human as the rest; it’s so much easier to turn on a light switch than to manually adjust a multitude of blinds. We also have the added sophistication-come-complexity of the venetian blind that reveals further behavioural limits; the subtleties of partially-open don’t fit with our habitual binary mentality – anything more than on-off, up-down, open-closed is just too demanding.

So, wherein lies the way out of this conundrum? Do we throw in the towel and use windows just for peeping through? Establish environmental prefects to police our actions and recondition our behaviour and expectations? Or develop a system of wind-up lights and switched blinds? Whatever it is, let’s do something to naturally lighten up our lives.

Gillian Horn is a partner with Penoyre & Prasad