APPENDIX II
PREMISES AND ACCOMMODATION
THE following are broad general points to be borne in mind in planning new premises:
In the first place, whether or not the art school shares a building with other activities, it is generally desirable that it should be planned vertically rather than that the top floor of a large building should be allotted to it. While the rooms used for such purposes as drawing and painting from life will need north lighting and plenty of it, and may suitably be placed on a top storey, there are other rooms, such as design rooms, which are all the better for some cheerful sunlight. This also applies to the workshops in general, which may be expected to constitute the most important feature of the average school. It will generally be desirable to place on the lower floors subjects involving the use of bulky materials and heavy equipment or machinery.
"Departments", such as those of dress and allied crafts, of modelling and sculpture (which may include pottery and plaster-work), or of book production (including illustration and bookbinding as well as printing), should be as far as possible self-contained.
[page 51]
Enough storage accommodation provided in the right place is very important. Nearly every room in the average art school may advantageously have its own separate and contiguous store-room.
The provision of space for exhibitions is essential. A special exhibition-room, set apart for the purpose and readily accessible to the public, is desirable. Where such special provision cannot be justified, a useful arrangement is to have folding doors between two rooms enabling the rooms to be thrown into one for holding an exhibition. In any case there should be plenty of room in the entrance hall for showing some attractive examples of the work of the school, and the possibility of a display window on the street front should be considered. It should be borne in mind that in some centres there may be no facilities for exhibitions other than those provided by the art school.
While some workshops, such as those used for painting and decorating and cabinet-making, will generally serve only that specific purpose, yet, especially in the case of the smaller school, it will sometimes be justifiable to equip a single room for more than one use. The room should then be planned so that it may, if necessary, be used for more than one purpose at a time, and the need for constant shifting of equipment should, as far as possible, be eliminated.
The artificial lighting of art schools is an interesting study and many experiments have been made, especially in life rooms, with the object of securing the best results. It is probably generally true that, apart from the special problems presented by the life and antique rooms, all rooms in which practical craft work is done should be provided with individual lights for each student, and that this should also be done in the case of design, illustration, architectural drawing, etc., unless the general lighting of the room is exceptionally bright and is planned to avoid glare and eyestrain due to changing light. While a room should not be filled up with a greater number of lighting fittings than are essential, real efficiency in illumination should be put before all other considerations. In life rooms it has sometimes been found useful to arrange the main source of illumination for the model so that it comes from the same direction as the main supply of daylight. However, in planning art school lighting, specialist advice should always be sought from such a source as the Building Centre and the Electric Light Manufacturers Association Lighting Service Bureau, where full information about the latest systems and apparatus is available.
New schools should always be planned in such a way that extensions can easily be added, and the interior arrangements should as far as possible permit of the rooms being altered in size to meet new and
[page 52]
unforeseen needs; if possible, equipment should not be permanently fixed. The importance of this is evident when we realise the extent to which art school plans to-day differ from the plans of thirty years ago, especially in the importance now given to workshop accommodation. Indeed, it has often come about that although the amount of space available in an old building is sufficient, the character of the accommodation is wholly unsuitable for modern requirements.
While a special room should be set aside as a library where students may occasionally not only read but work from plates, etc., it is what the library contains rather than the way in which it is housed which will count for most. In addition to books, there should be current magazines; and collections of plates and reproductions, as well as lantern slides, suitably indexed. Where it is not possible to allocate a special room for the library, books should be kept in some place where students can see the titles on the backs, so that they know what is available; it will often be found that it is in any case useful for certain books which are in constant use to be stored in the rooms where the subjects with which they deal are taught.
For art schools serving as centres it is not possible, even if it were desirable, to lay down a rigid formula relating the schedule of accommodation to the size of the population served. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, the number of students forthcoming is likely to vary, at any rate to some extent, according to the nature of the district; in the second place, the type of provision needed will depend on the kind of work required in the locality. For, example, the presence of manufacturing or commercial undertakings on which art has a bearing will affect both the numbers to be provided for and the kind of provision needed. Moreover, the extent to which different kinds of work are likely to be required will govern the extent to which it may be justifiable to provide single-purpose rooms, or rooms which serve more than one purpose. For instance, unless practical work in window display is to be done on all or most evenings, it will make for economy to provide facilities for display in a part of a room used on other evenings for other purposes, and to make use of the exhibition hall, if one is available, for some of the practical work in setting up displays. Modelling and carving, or modelling and pottery, may in the same way sometimes be combined, especially if the same teacher is likely to be responsible for both subjects. Such crafts as dress design and embroidery may also lend themselves to similar treatment.
In the following Schedule, the areas suggested for the rooms are such as would contain the number of students who can con-
[page 53]
veniently be dealt with at one time. At some large centres it may, of course, be more economical to provide both studio and workshop accommodation on a scale which will allow for a very large number of students to be dealt with in certain rooms, and some rooms may need to be duplicated.
The storage needed will, of course, vary with the type of work, e.g. a wood store must be long enough as well as big enough, and the display room will need an extra large store; but 150 square feet per studio or workshop should give a fair average.
Twenty-five feet has generally been proved a satisfactory figure to take for the width of studios and workshops, and the planning of accommodation is facilitated by the adoption of a standard width. It may, however, be convenient to arrange for certain rooms, e.g. a painting and decorating workshop, to be wider, and such rooms may often be placed at the end of a wing where corridor space will not be needed and the whole width of the building will be available. If the corridors are 10 feet wide to allow for lockers big enough to take imperial size drawing-boards, it will then be possible, for example, to plan a spacious room 35 feet square at the end of a wing.
In deciding what height to give to a room which will not be top lit, the need for daylight lighting good enough to illuminate properly the side of the room farthest from the windows should be borne in mind.
The following schedule should not be considered exhaustive where it relates to the probable requirements of a large school, since it is very likely that at certain centres special work of a kind not generally required will be called for.
[page 54]
SCHEDULE
Description of Room | Size of School |
| MEDIUM sq. ft. | LARGE sq. ft. |
STUDIOS | | |
General Drawing | 1,000 | 1,000 |
Life (for painting and drawing) | 850 | 850 |
Antique and Painting | 1,000 | - |
Antique | - | 850 |
Painting | - | 850 |
Design | 800 | 1,000 |
Design and Display | 1,200 | - |
Architecture | - | 1,000 |
Building Specimens Room | - | 250 |
WORKSHOPS | | |
Modelling | - | 850 |
Modelling and Pottery | 850 | - |
Casting Room | 250 | 500 |
Pottery (exclusive of kilns) | - | 750 |
Stone and Wood Carving | - | 750 |
Fibrous Plastering | - | 750 |
Plain Plastering | - | 750 |
Plastering (both Plain and Fibrous) | 1,000 | - |
Metalwork | 500 | 850 |
Painting and Decorating | 1,000 | 1,250 |
Signwriting | - | 850 |
Paperhanging | - | 750 |
Wet Varnish Room | 120 | 120 |
Spray Painting | - | 400 |
PRINTING | | |
Compositors' Work | - | 800 |
Letterpress Machine | - | 1,000 |
(Will vary according to the nature of the machinery required and may need to be larger, but no room under this size should be provided for this purpose in the first instance.)
[page 55]
Description of Room | Size of School |
| MEDIUM sq. ft. | LARGE sq. ft. |
PRINTING (cont.) | | |
Machine Composition | - | 500 |
Compositors' Work and Letterpress Machine | 1,250 | - |
Lithography (Artists' Room) | - | 750 |
Lithography (Machine Work) | - | 850 |
Litho Stone and Plate Polishing and Graining | - | 250 |
Lithography | 750 | - |
Photo-process | - | 750 |
Bookbinding | - | 750 |
Photography (exclusive of Dark Rooms) | - | 850 |
Engraving and Etching (excluding Printing Room) | 500 | 750 |
Cabinet-making | 1,000 | 1,250 |
Cabinet-making (Special Equipment) | - | 500 |
Cabinet-making Store for Finished Work and Work in Hand | 200 | 300 |
Display (if a Special Room needed, but not including Display Workshop) | 1,000 | 1,200 |
Display Workshop | - | 300 |
DRESS AND ALLIED CRAFTS | | |
General | 1,000 | - |
Dress Design (including Fitting Room) | - | 1,000 |
Embroidery (Hand) | - | 750 |
Embroidery-(Machine) | - | 500 |
Millinery | - | 750 |
Weaving | - | 750 |
Fabric Printing | - | 750 |
Lecture Room (to seat 60) | 600 | - |
Lecture Room (to seat 200) | - | 2,000* |
*More if seating banked.
[page 56]
Description of Room | |
Library (with facilities for Drawing, etc.) Exhibition Room. Students' Common Rooms Staff Rooms | The sizes will of course vary according to the size of the School, but 500 square feet for the Library and 1,000 square feet the for Exhibition Hall may be regarded as reasonable minima. |
A greenhouse, which may suitably be situated next to the General Drawing or Design Studios, is a very useful - indeed, almost an essential - part of the provision if the drawing and painting of plants is to be successfully tackled.
The desirability of making the best possible use of any available garden space will scarcely need to be stressed.
[page 57]
OTHER PAMPHLETS IN THIS SERIES
No. 3. Youth's Opportunity: Further Education in County Colleges (1946). 2s. (2s. 1½d.)
No. 4. Building Crafts: Education for Industry and Commerce (1945). 1s. (1s. 1½d.)
No, 7. Entrants to the Mining Industry: Education for Industry and Commerce (1947). 6d. (7½d.)
No. 8. Further Education (1947). 3s. 6d. (3s. 9d.)
No. 9. The New Secondary Education (1947). 2s. 6d. (2s. 8d.)
No. 11. Organised Camping (2nd edition, 1951). 1s. 3d. (1s. 4½d.)
No. 12. UNESCO and a World Society (1948). 1s. (1s. 1½d.)
No. 13. Safety Precautions in Schools (1948). 9d. (10½d.)
No. 14. Story of a School: A Headmaster's Experiences with Children Aged Seven to Eleven (1949). 1s. (1s. 1½d.)
No. 16. Citizens Growing Up: At Home, in School and After (1949). 1s. (1s. 1½d.)
No. 17. Challenge and Response: An Account of the Emergency Scheme for the Training of Teachers (1950). 4s. (4s. 3d.)
No. 18. Reading Ability: Some Suggestions for Helping the Backward (1950). 2s. (2s. 1½d.)
No. 19. The Road to the Sixth Form: Some Suggestions on the Curriculum of the Grammar School (1951). 1s. 3d. (1s. 4½d.)
No. 20. School Broadcasts: A Sample Study from the Listeners' End (1952). 1s. 6d. (1s. 7½d.)
No. 21. The School Library (1952). 2s. (2s. 1½d.)
No. 22. Metalwork in Secondary Schools (1952). 3s. 6d. (3s. 7½d.)
No. 23. Teaching History (1952). 3s. 6d. (3s. 8d.)
No. 24. Moving and Growing. (Physical Education in the Primary School, Part I) (1952). 6s. (6s. 4d.)
No. 25. Planning the Programme (Physical Education in the Primary School, Part II) (1953). 6s. (6s. 5d.)
No. 26. Language: Some Suggestions for Teachers and others in Primary and Secondary Schools, and in Further Education. (1954). 3s. 6d. (3s. 8d.)
Prices in brackets include postage
OBTAINABLE FROM HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE AT THE ADDRESSES ON PAGE TWO
[back cover]