The Need for Sustainable School Architecture is More Important Than Ever

On a grassy hillside nestled into a live oak woodland ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of elementary students armed with clipboards huddle around a cluster of native vegetation, sketching its craggy form and jotting down observations. There’s dirt under their fingernails and, lacking desks, their clipboards wobble precariously on their knees, but not one of them seems to care. They are completely engrossed in the landscape they’re studying.

This is a fairly typical morning at the Nueva School, where the newly built Science and Environmental Center (SEC) houses indoor-outdoor classes for lower and middle school students. Recently awarded the 2024 Green Good Design: Green Architecture award, the bustling new building is the latest net-zero carbon addition to the campus.

It’s also evidence of an increasingly vital part of our built environment: sustainable school architecture. Not just because it is infrastructure that will always be necessary—unlike, say, office buildings, as the post-pandemic years have proven—but as William Leddy, principal architect of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (the firm that designed the Nueva School SEC) says, thoughtful school architecture can “actually empower kids to understand that they have agency to make changes in this world.” AD Mag.

The Nueva School in California

So what does a sustainable school building look like? Sustainability is multifaceted, but the first step is often reducing energy use. Buildings currently produce 40% of global greenhouse gasses, including both embodied energy (energy involved in the production of building and materials themselves) and operational energy. “A lesson I’ve learned [as an architect in] the 21st century, is to try to make the most with the least,” says Leddy.

To lower operational energy, The Nueva School’s SEC is built with an open corridor, mitigating the carbon costs of enclosing the space while also bridging classrooms with the outdoors. Additionally, solar panels provide all of the energy needed for around-the-clock operations, and a massive cistern collects rainwater for building use, responding to the drought-ridden regional climate.

Solar Pannels at Nueva School

This isn’t the only way to cut carbon. In Mexico, the School of Visual Arts of Oaxaca, designed by Taller de Arquitectura - Mauricio Rocha, reduces emissions by building with locally available material, saving emissions produced by transportation or shipping needs. The school is constructed with rammed earth, which naturally insulates and is both water-proof and fire-resistant, while accommodating the extreme climate of Oaxaca.

Even relatively simple additions, such as expansive windows, can have a positive environmental impact. By building spaces with large windows that let in natural light, schools can reduce electricity use. The School of Visual Arts uses floor-to-ceiling windows to provide the best possible indoor lighting while reducing direct sunlight exposure, keeping the spaces both temperate and well-lit.

Inside Green School Bali

Not only are these sustainable features better for the earth, they help students too. “Daylight turns out to be very important,” Lisa Gelfand, principal at Gelfand Partners Architects and author of Sustainable School Architecture: Design for Elementary and Secondary Schools says about factors that have been proven to affect student achievement. Lee Fertig, head of school at the Nueva School, explains how he has noticed this impact. “We see that natural light actually inspires learners and teachers in an educational setting,” he adds.

At Green School Bali, another sustainable school, the approach to sunlight is simplified to its barest bones—literally and figuratively, with the majority of the buildings on campus bearing no walls at all. “I’m in one of the few buildings here with windows,” reports Benjamin Freud, Head of the Upper School at Green School Bali, during an interview with AD. “And that’s because of privacy,” he added.

Eliminating walls from building construction both reduces the carbon footprint of materials and reduces the operational cost of having to regulate the temperature within the buildings. It also encourages greater interactions with the natural world in which the campus sits, as students traveling from class to class are immersed in the surrounding jungle.

Designed as a series of skeletal arches made from locally sourced bamboo, one of the most eye-catching buildings on campus at Green School is the Arc, a space used as a gymnasium and gathering space for assemblies.

Unique in its construction, the building is held up by tensioned anticlastic gridshells; “the two systems together create a unique and highly efficient structure that acts in flexion instead of compression,” says Elora Hardy, founder and creative director of IBUKU, the firm that designed the Arc. The floor of the space is made from 80% recycled airplane tires, yet another example of thoughtful material sourcing that minimizes waste. In addition to its sustainability factors, the space also provides students with ample fresh air, which has been proven to improve performance and raises test scores.

Not every school is well-suited for a dramatic structure like the Arc, but there are other ways to achieve these sustainable measures while also designing spaces optimized for student learning. As Gelfand explains further, relatively simple adjustments like utilizing windows for natural light and fresh air, or adding light sensors to limit the amount of electricity used during daylight hours, can be beneficial for schools with tighter budgets.

The simple addition of expansive windows, such as those seen at Nueva School has a big impact.

“We didn't have to take walls apart or put in expensive windows or do anything like that,” says Gelfand, speaking on her work designing sustainable public schools that didn’t have a budget for major renovations. “Just daylight and a control system on the lights, and now your kids are going to do better and you'll spend less money.

But equally important to reducing energy use is creating buildings that will last. In her work, Gelfand tries to “remind people that we design schools as 50-year buildings.” A resilient building, after all, is one that will grow with the community and meet its needs over time, eliminating the future need to start fresh and build anew.

The Nueva School solves for longevity through designing classrooms that can serve different classes with different purposes. Speaking about the SEC rooms, Fertig explains that classrooms are open and flexible, with portable furniture that can reorient to serve class needs. For example, classrooms are equipped for biology, chemistry, and environmental science, but also the humanities.

“[Young people] are viewing things like climate change, for example, [as] a highly complex nexus of a variety of factors…you just can’t peg one academic discipline as the sole source of all knowledge related to climate,” he continues. Building flexible classrooms gives the building a lifespan beyond one class or even one era of pedagogy, which, as Fertig elucidates, are sure to evolve.

Freud believes that sustainable schools are a physical manifestation of a pledge to safeguard children and young adults’ futures. “These young children are living to 2125, and no one is talking about that,” he says. “It starts at the very basics that educating for sustainability and regeneration is a child-protective issue.”

And many reaffirm that these structures are also symbols of hope and sources of inspiration for students. “It’s tone deaf for us to not create and develop learning spaces that are testimonials to [our commitment to the planet],” adds Fertig. If students can attend schools that show, rather than just tell, how individuals can contribute to building a sustainable future, perhaps they can inspire action amongst young people. “[At] a school like that,” says Leddy, “you consider yourself a little pebble in the pond. You create ripples…you encourage the tipping point that we all have to reach.