A Decision-Aid Tool to Evaluate the Contribution of Space Syntax of School Buildings to Educational Performance

Jean-Philippe Thérien (University Laval School of Architecture)

This communication reports on an ongoing research project aiming at developing a decision-aid tool to evaluate school plan layouts in terms of spatial organizations and metrics. This research is part of the larger mission Schola.ca, a transdisciplinary research program funded by the Quebec Ministry of Education in Canada and based at Laval University. The main goal is to inform the renovation and modernization of over 2000 primary schools and 300 secondary schools in the province. This research is based on the Space Syntax Theory, a space analysis approach – well-known in healthcare space planning and in urban studies – that considers spatial configurations and human activities. This project attempts to understand the key role of space syntax analysis in the evaluation of school building performance. A main aspect of the research problem is that these schools were built at different periods, from the early 1900s until recently. Various school types and construction methods were used through the years and the majority of schools were expanded to support more complex educational programs. The hypothesis is that original floor plans have often lost their initial syntactic coherence – simplicity of use – and compactness. In order to assess this supposition, a national sample of 310 primary school floor plans was transcribed on the web-based platform for space and plan management Archidata(c) to perform functional and metric analysis. In parallel, space syntax indicators are introduced to provide decision makers with inputs about educational performance. At the end, two comparative case studieswill present the potential of syntactic evaluation in school building layouts.

Keywords: Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE), space syntax, school architecture, educational building performance