A history and evaluation of the school construction systems development project, 1961-1967

[Extract from introduction] During the years 1962 - 1967, the School Planning Laboratory at Stanford University and the University of California, Department of Architecture, Berkeley, acting under a grant from the Ford Foundation's Educational Facilities Laboratories, jointly attempted to develop new approaches to the design and construction of school facilities . This project, known as the School Construction Systems Development (hereafter referred to as SCSD) has sought to apply industrial techniques of standardization and systems analysis in an attempt to develop a new and more economical building technology. During the course of this project a system was developed whereby the need for standardized components that could be prefabricated and assembled in a variety of ways was identified, tested, and used in the construction of twelve secondary schools and one elementary school in the State of California. The project attracted world-wide attention reflected in articles appearing in United States, Canadian, British, French, German and Czechoslovakian publications. A test building was constructed on the Stanford campus with the SCSD system which has been visited by leading architects and educators from almost every country in the world. The SCSD project has now successfully demonstrated that it is possible to develop standard components for building and assemble them in ways that will produce variety in building design. When SCSD began its investigation into the feasibility of creating such a building system for schools, there had been no large scale attempts to develop building systems in the United States. Until the advent of SCSD most of the important work in this field had been done in Great Britain. With the experience obtained from a thorough study of British Systems as the only useful precedent, SCSD was forced to develop procedures and organizational arrangement allowing architects, engineers, manufacturers and educators to work together in order to meet the demands which developed in the process of formulating, testing, and applying the ideas leading to the creation of SCSD building systems. While the SCSD Project is often thought of as a broad scale experiment in architecture, much of the significance of this program is to be found in the development of acceptable social and political procedures which permit a much wider acceptance of useful technology little used in the building industry. One of the great practical lessons to be learned from this project was that in the field of innovation, the technical problems are minor compared to the political ones. Technical problems may be solved on paper by capable designers. To get that solution built on a job site may demand hours of negotiation with production engineers, industrial administrators, lawyers, professional associations, trade unions, arc hitects, engineers, state officials and contractors. Success depends ultimately on the understanding and cooperation of the worker on the job. Reluctance, lack of understanding, conservatism or apathy on the part of any of these persons may consign a brilliant solution to oblivion. In addition to devising technical solutions, project personnel were forced to devise new procedures for getting acceptance of these technical solutions within the complex of organizations and individuals involved in the design and construction of the California school plant.