My name is Claire Bank, and I am a registered architect with ThenDesign Architecture.

At TDA, it’s a very collaborative environment. I think what really adds value to the projects is the number of voices and input. With an open studio, you just hear what’s going on in different projects, and it’s very easy to pull anybody’s opinion on something that could really help to shape and influence a design in a way that you wouldn’t have necessarily thought of otherwise.

As far as sort of what we bring to a school district, who’s trying to shape the educational spaces for their future, we go through a lot of engagement with their staff and with their administration and with their students, that all let us know types of projects they’re working on types of vision that they have for their education in the future. So we’re seeing less of a desire for really traditional educational spaces with like corridor and double loaded classrooms on either side and more and more different scaled spaces for different types of groups to meet and to do education in kind of a transforming way.

So schools already are really ingrained in their community and I think have always served as a hub for their community in some form. With each school that we do, we’re seeing more community aspects woven into it. And even with the pandemic closing schools down, I think people started to realize just how much of a hub those schools are. In the future, I could see more community influence and more community use of the schools that would help to shape some of the spaces.

Watching my parents as I grew up and their involvement in education, you really could pull different lessons about how schools function and the importance of schools from each one. My dad being more of the administrative side of things. My mom on the other hand was a second grade teacher. And she is, I’d say the softer heart of the two [laughter]. And there you see more just kind of the social functions that schools can serve and the level of care that she would bring to those students. From watching both of them, I could get a really great kind of well-rounded idea of how much schools do for their communities and with that, as far as architecture’s relationship, they need, they need the right facilities.

I know that educators are always creative with whatever facilities they have, but the more we can help them to have the facilities that support what they want to do the better.