The Schools of Herman Hertzberger

Schools crops up often in Hertzberger’s prodigious oeuvre. They are his favourite buildings, he says. Hertzberger designs schools that are to function like cities. Schools and cities, he contends, can be read in many ways and are challenging, inspirational and inviting. School is where you can withdraw and adopt a position with respect to others, where you learn to take a place in society. Besides a presentation of Hertzberger’s thirty-plus built schools and a number of unbuilt ones, the sociologist Abram de Swaan addresses Hertzberger’s work in an essay. Aided by examples, he examines how school architecture and the way school buildings are organized impacts the social development of children. De Swaan pays tribute to Hertzberger as a pre-eminently ’sociological’ architect.