Planning Educational Facilities

This is a book about planning educational facilities. With the traditional process, administrators assume they know about the needs of their clients. With this assumption, the end result is often a facility that is only half what it could have been. This book describes a process for planning educational facilities which respond to the community's educational needs. By determining the needs of the local citizenry, and developing building programs that reflect that need, the first critical steps in planning efficient and effective educational facilities will have been taken. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 discuss how this can be accomplished. The remaining chapters examine three critical issues: designing energy-efficient buildings; incorporating design strategies to reduce vandalism; and planning for the use of educational technology in the educational facility. These last chapters are designed to provide planning committees with sufficient information so they may raise questions about these issues with the architect.