Creating Accessible School Spaces: How Architecture Can Facilitate Learning

With over 30 years of experience in the architectural industry, Michael van Bakel has largely focused his professional career on designing functional yet beautiful educational spaces across BC. His interest in working in this precise and challenging architectural sector was sparked back in high school. Reflecting on these formative years, Michael details that:

I’d been through the standard 1960s schools everyone seems to have attended: endless concrete-block walls, polished linoleum corridors lined with worse for wear lockers and opaque doors, under-lit with flickering fluorescent lights. Then I ended up in a newly built high school that completely broke the mold. No classrooms. Only large library-like resource centres and seminar rooms for each subject area, prepackaged coursework, self-paced, self-directed, with teachers on stand-by to individually help students who required assistance. And no age-discriminated class structures.

In retrospect, Michael sees this groundbreaking approach to education as an early precursor to the student-focused, project-based pedagogical models that we are working with today.

When asked what it was about this novel approach that was so impactful, he notes that “It was liberating on many levels at that time, and it wasn’t until I returned to one of those ‘traditional’ schools for my last year of high school that I fully appreciated the effect the building had on my interest in being there. I couldn’t get out of the last school fast enough.” Those high school years may have come and gone, but the contrast of those experiences continues to inform many of Michael’s design choices when renovating existing schools or building entirely new education spaces.

For him, the work of recreating this sense of liberation for today’s contemporary learners means creating accessible spaces of respectful inclusivity— spaces where diverse groups of individuals can feel safe, represented, nurtured, and excited to learn. Naturally, this passion propelled him beyond architectural design. In addition to his practice, Michael maintains active membership in the Association for Learning Environments’ (A4LE) BC Chapter. His interest in the A4LE was sparked while attending a conference that the association had sponsored. The seminars at this conference "dove deeply into studies of architecture’s impact on learning behaviour and academic success," something Michael had been tinkering with for years.

Much like the ideas workshopped in Michael’s non-traditional high school, the interdisciplinary A4LE is guided by a strategic mission to create place-driven spaces that promote respect, inclusivity, and accessibility. When asked if it was challenging to translate the high-level principles he encounters in his work with the A4LE into the built forms he designs as an architect, Michael said:

Yes, but that’s why it’s interesting. Generally, the challenges are due to several factors that are often rooted in preconceptions of the nature of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘accessibility,’ which may not be shared universally between clients, districts, stakeholders, or user groups. Other times it’s the result of inevitable conflicts between what the client believes to be necessary and what the funding agency’s policies allow them to fund. As architects, our function is to act as mediators. Part of designing functional spaces within the parameters of the educational sector means finding acceptable solutions, perhaps innovations, that satisfy all the stakeholders whilst keeping the needs of learners at the forefront.

Despite the intellectual and technical challenges that come with designing inclusive and accessible school spaces, the rewards make it all worthwhile. For Michael, that reward comes in the form of “Walking through the school the day it opens and hearing the excitement and delight in the children’s voices, and then going back a year later to find they’re still just as enthusiastic.”

It’s often cited that there was something in the air in 1960s. Revolution, resistance, freedom, or perhaps a simple yet radical willingness to concede that things didn’t always have to continue on as they always had. Having experienced the trickle-down effect of non-conformity in his teens, Michael carries that sense of liberation with him, seeking out new ways to unscrew the doors from the jambs (both figuratively and literally) and open up new opportunities for the current and future students to cultivate their own sense of freedom and belonging.