ment of assembly rooms for large buildings and also for smaller buildings.

An assembly room should be provided with a stage of ample proportions. Upon this stage the young people will gather on graduation day to receive their diplomas; upon it they will give their plays, choruses, and recitals; from it they can hear lectures and concerts by visiting talent; and in many ways there will be need for a roomy and safely built stage. There should be dressing or retiring rooms at both ends of the stage and on the same level with it.

Some interesting plans, especially those designed by William B. Ittner, of St. Louis, show an enlarged stage equipped as a gymnasium. With means of a temporary partition or drop curtain this may be reduced to the ordinary sized stage or opened up to the audience as a gymnasium. In this connection the following from Bulletin (1922) No. 23 of the United States Bureau of Education says:

Experience has proved that it is altogether feasible to expand the stage to the size of a standard gymnasium and by this method to increase the seating capacity of the auditorium whenever desired. The combination stage-gymnasium also has other advantages. It gives opportunity to view physial educational exhibitions from the auditorium and makes provision for large choruses, symphony concerts, and community activities for which an ordinary stage is always inadequate.*

All assembly rooms call for ample light, and the stage should have windows, but placed so high that they can not be seen by the audience. (In large schools there should be a gallery so constructed as to require as few supports from the main floor as possible, and built with due care for the demands of acoustics.) The lighting of an assembly hall is an important feature in its usefulness and should be given careful consideration. If, as has been suggested, this room is placed on the central axis of the building and on the ground floor, light can be had from both sides, above and below the gallery.

In village and country high schools there is as much or more need, comparatively speaking, for assembly halls as in cities with more pretentious buildings, and yet under the stress of financial conditions they are often eliminated from the plans for the smaller schools. The accompanying floor plans for a small building (fig. 7) were drawn with this difficulty in mind, and the hallway has been widened so as to serve both for a passageway and an assembly room. It will be observed that the hall is shorter than the wings of the building and ends in a raised platform or stage, which can be cut off by folding or sliding doors and used as a library, principal's office, and a

* High-school buildings and grounds. A report of the commission on the reorganization of secondary education appointed by the National Education Association. U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin (1922) No. 23.

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stage. An open fire in the center will make it attractive from within the office, and also from the assembly hall. It will be noticed that cloakrooms are connected with each room so as to keep the hall clear. Movable chairs can be used and quickly arranged when needed and crowded together when a wider passageway is required along the sides or across the hall to facilitate the movement of the students between recitations. Provision can easily be made in the event that this room is desired for a study room. The ceiling of the assembly room is high, is finished to show the timbers, and is lighted from above. I am indebted to Mr. Bernard Maybeck, architect, Berkeley, Calif., for the drawings. This building can be built of wood, plastered on the outside or shingled, or of brick or stone. It does not readily lend itself to a painted clapboard construction. It

FIG. 7.-Plan for a village high school, so arranged that the hall may serve as an assembly room, with the main office as the stage.

should be made to blend with the landscape, and when covered with vines will make a charming village high school for the accommodation of 75 to 100 students. The only serious difficulties to contend with are the long valleys in the roofs at each side of the assembly room, and, in the hotter parts of the country, the lack of a cross breeze in the lower part of the assembly room.

It is characteristic of an American community to expect of the architect more school accomodations than the money allowed him will buy. Amost invariably the demand comes for an assembly room and very frequently for a gymnasium, and yet not more than half enough money is voted or set aside for the construction of the building desired. It has therefore become necessary to sacrifice some features of the building demanded or to insist on waiting until sufficient funds are in hand to do what the community wishes.

All schools in city or country need some sort of an assembly room where the school children may congregate or where the whole community may join in entertainments or more serious educational undertakings. But a room built only for an assembly, with a sloping floor and fixed chairs is used too infrequently in small to medium-sized schools to warrant this heavy outlay. So it has become necessary to plan an assembly room with a level floor, without fixed seats and with a sufficiently high ceiling, that it may be used for a gymnasium as well as for mere assembly purposes. One of the chief difficulties with this has been the trouble of handling chairs. To get them out of the way for gymnasium exercises and to replace them again for assembly purposes has been a serious problem. Much relief, however, has come by building a stage a little higher than ordinary, so framing it that stalls can be made under it facing the assembly floor, and small trucks, the width of a folding chair and the length of the depth of the stage, constructed with counter-sunk casters, upon which to place the chairs and run them under the stage when not needed. These little trucks or cars are not expensive to make, they require only a groove on either side under the stage upon which to run the casters, and posts at each end to prevent the chairs from sliding off. One of these will hold sometimes as many as a hundred chairs and thus practically all of the chairs can be cared for by using a few trucks. When chairs are to be removed from the floor, the trucks are run out into the room; the chairs are picked up and placed on the trucks in an orderly way, and then pushed under the stage. Vice versa when chairs are needed the trucks can be pulled out onto the floor and the chairs placed quickly as required. Naturally double doors are set in front of the stalls to close them when the chairs are removed or returned. This device has been used for a number of years. It has made an assembly room serve assembly, gymnasium, and social purposes, to say nothing of exhibitions or fairs. Thus the value of this room and the income from the investment have been multiplied many fold.

XVII. SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE AND SCHOOL IMPROVE

MENT.

This is the age of schools and schoolhouses as characteristically as the latter part of the Middle Ages was the period of churches and great church buildings. In each case the faith and fervor of the people can be read and fairly understood through a critical study of these objective results and the ideals for which they stand. It will not miss the mark very far to say that our ideals and feelings associated with the notion of popular education are becoming suffused with a glow and zeal heretofore only found associated directly or

indirectly with religious faith and religious propaganda. And something of the same spirit that once wrought to build a tabernacle or a cathedral worthy of a dwelling place of the Most High is seeking expression in furnishing to the youth of our land nobler temples in which their hearts, minds, and bodies may better adjust themselves to the demands of a practical civic brotherhood. Whoever, then, undertakes to build a schoolhouse to meet and foster these ideals ought to approach his task with holy hands and a consciousness of the devotion which it is to typify.

The problem, then, of building a schoolhouse to-day is in no small sense complicated by the growing tendency to use schoolhouses for all sorts of attempts at social betterment. Schoolhouses, especially in the large cities, have come to be used night and day, suínmer and winter. Vacation schools have been established, in which unusual programs of work and play have been introduced, and for their successful consummation such programs often demand equipment and accommodations not needed in the regular day schools. Lecture courses have been introduced not primarily for school children but for those who have quit school and gone to work, for those adults who have a desire to keep up their intellectual interests, and for those also who have sufficient spiritual pride to begin even late in life. But such buildings demand special equipment in the way of lighting, stereopticons, photographic rooms, assembly halls readily accessible, chairs, platforms, moving-picture machines, etc.

Manual and technical training courses have been introduced, demanding power plants not heretofore needed, or at least not thought desirable. Playgrounds are in greater demand, not only for the regular school children, but for those who for various reasons are denied school privileges through the day. Such children may come in the evening, after school hours, or on holidays. This demand for greater space and better adjustment led to roof playgrounds on school buildings. But no sooner had they been built than it was discovered that such favored and well-ventilated areas could be utilized as social gathering places, where good music could be heard, where the young people could meet and enjoy social dances under wholesome and safe environments, and where society could institute rational competition with the cheap vulgar shows and dangerous dance halls rampant on the streets below.

There are social movements in almost every community in our country to-day looking toward educational betterment, and such movements should be fostered, guided, and rationalized. Whenever these are for any worthy reason disconnected from church organizations, either the public-library building, some building designed especially for social workers, or the public-school buildings ought to be available as a center for such workers.

The school building has many advantages, for it is the citadel of a democracy, and there has developed about it a sentiment of dignity and decorum, influential in all movements undertaken within its precincts. Furthermore, the use of these buildings for worthy social work of all kinds is bringing school work into more vital touch with the real life of the world; vice versa, it is bringing the American community into a more vital relation with the teachers and those who are responsible for schools and school organization.

In planning even a country schoolhouse or village high-school building, one must therefore think out into the possible needs of the community and enlarge his usual notions of the scope and purpose of public-school education.

Some day in the near future more pains will be taken to make schoolhouses beautiful in external appearance as well as commodious and healthful within. Thus far the architects of the large majority of our smaller school buildings have clung tenaciously to the "schoolhouse type," and have given us, in the main, buildings devoid of any attempt at niceties of proportion or unity of design. In many cases attempts at cheap ornamentation have been made at the expense of real beauty of form and hygienic considerations.

It seems strange, on first thought, that our schoolhouses have been the last of public buildings through which public taste has sought to express itself. But when one recalls that this tardy recognition of children's rights has exhibited itself in all lines of endeavor wherein the education and care of children were concerned, a fundamental phase of human nature is brought into light. Adults have regularly thought and planned first for the satisfaction of their own needs rather than those of the children. If the reader is inclined to doubt this, let him make a study of the Sunday-school rooms of our churches and compare them with the rooms of the same buildings set apart in the main for the use of adults. Let him examine the homes and contrast the provisions made for adults with those for the children, and he will understand more clearly what I mean. Even children's clothing is designed not so much for personal comfort, joy, and approval of children as for the satisfaction of older people. Precisely for the same reason that the education of children at public expense has been, in the main, the last phase in the development of our educational systems, we may expect that schoolhouses for the little children will not receive so careful attention from the general public in our generation as those designed for college students or students of our secondary schools. But a protest should be entered against this selfishness and, at the same time, a plea made for the æsthetic education of the children and through them the development of an enlightened conscience and artistic sense in the public