Planning a new grade school, Scarsdale, N.Y. officials deliberately set about to forget everything they knew of school design. The needed 14 classrooms, yet wanted a small-school atmosphere. They needed an efficient unit, yet wanted to separate children by age groups. Architects Perkins and Will met the requirments with a sprawling design which puts classrooms in clusters at the end of long corridors. In the picture above, Grades 1 and 2 are in one four-room cluster, 2 and 4 in another, 5 and 6 in the third. Kindergartens are in the two-room section at lower right.
The school, which cost less to built than a traditional school of equal size, makes expansion practical. Having won a national architectural award, Heathcote is regarded by experts as a forerunner of schools of the future.
Along with its small-school atmosphere, Heathcote was designed to give its pupils a feeling of closeness to nature. More than half the school's exterior walls, corridors as well as classrooms, are of glass. From within the school children in every clasroom are exposed all day to the rolling grounds, the birds and the occasional rabbits. And outside they are only seconds away from a first-hand study of trees and flowers and stones.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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