For more than twenty-five years I've helped communities on six continents replace the classroom-and-corridor school with places designed around how children actually learn.
School buildings are the last domino standing between the past and the future of education. When the architecture changes, the teaching can finally change with it.
Replacing the "cells and bells" of the industrial-era school with fluid, light-filled, human-scaled environments doesn't just look different — it makes different things possible in a child's day. Three words guide every project I take on.
I publish a new essay roughly once a month. Two recent pieces — read them in full on Education Design International.
AI can already deliver content, personalize instruction and give instant feedback. So will schools survive? Yes — not as content-delivery systems, but as among the last physical places intentionally responsible for human development at scale.
Most students still spend their day inside a classroom — a relic of the Industrial Revolution built to deliver basic skills to a mass workforce. Decades of cognitive science say it can't deliver the creative, agile education this century demands.
Two decades of thinking about how buildings teach. Each is featured, with purchase details, on the EDI site.
This site is about the ideas. The projects — 200+ schools across 59 countries — and the team of 60 specialists who design them are the work of EDI, the firm I founded and lead. If you're planning a school, that's where to begin.
