This thesis addresses a disciplinary paradox head-on: architecture is perceived as a premium, yet is always calculated through efficiency. Particularly in the American context, net to gross ratios, which determine building budgets and outcomes, aim at minimizing unprogrammed space, and in so doing, reveal the extended effect of our culture’s puritanical tendencies.

Nowhere is this puritanism more evident than in our nation’s public schools, where ever tighter budgets, combined with a desire to control and normalize behavior, have resulted in one of the tightest net to gross relationships for any program.

Opposed to controlling through the minimizing of space, this thesis proposes a model of an expanded net to gross relationship for a prototypical high school.

The project focuses on the nature of excess—not simply as space considered more than necessary, but rather as space that is all too necessary for a school to flourish. Employing a hinged technique that operates at both the built and material scales, the project optimizes undefined space for circulation and extra-muros learning (acknowledging that the learning that occurs outside the classroom is as valuable as that that takes place within).

Financial efficiency is maintained without having to resort to spatial efficiency: by standardizing the classroom modules, their hinged connections, and the building’s material systems, each specific school is able to modify the prototype spatially, without either breaking the bank or losing the legibility of the whole figuration. The system offers a new, legible “school” typology that builds on a disciplinary legacy of part-to-whole relationships while simultaneously expanding spatial and mental horizons.

Advisors: Sarah Whiting & Alejandro Zaera-Polo; Liz Diller (Coordinator), Spring 2009