Unlocking Potential: De-Institutionalizing the Student Experience

Abstract

The average American public high school faces spatial limitations, rapid deterioration, compromised safety, and elevated levels of violent crime. These factors hinder the architecture's ability to serve its student populations. Facility quality impacts student success, absenteeism, infantilization, and behavioral misconduct; these consequences increase the risk factors that lead to deviant pathways in young people. Bowie High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, reflects a broader trend in the American high school typology, where security concerns take precedence over academic spaces. This has produced windowless, authoritarian spaces that, rather than inspiring students, reinforce a sense of confinement. Such conditions set an expectation for deviance and make these educational settings increasingly comparable to correctional institutions. In a place that should prioritize learning, safety, and community equally, American public school architecture has prioritized student security over the need for a space that fosters the cultivation of the young mind. Fortifying the environment inadvertently positions students as the source of the problem rather than those in need of protection, revealing a flaw in the typology. How can reformative design of an existing American high school reconcile the need for security with well-being? This thesis will examine the spatial, tectonic, and elemental choices made within the typology to establish how architecture creates programmatic opportunities for deviance. These findings will support the design of a school building that reconciles academic needs with security requirements through an adaptive, reformative architectural framework, creating spaces that ultimately foster joy.