Originally inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has since come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Author Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler traces the history and evolution of the American open plan from the brightly-colored office landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s to the monochromatic cubicles of the 1980s and 1990s, analyzing it both as a design concept promoted by architects, designers, and furniture manufacturers, and as a real work space inhabited by organizations and used by workers. The thematically structured chapters each focus on an attribute of the open plan to highlight the ideals embedded in the original design concept and the numerous technical, material, spatial, and social problems that emerged as it became a mainstream office design widely used in public and private organizations across the United States. Kaufmann-Buhler's fascinating new book weaves together a variety of voices, perspectives, and examples to capture the tensions embedded in the open plan concept and to unravel the assumptions, expectations, and inequities at its core.

In recent years many countries have built or renovated schools incorporating open plan design. These new spaces are advocated on the basis of claims that they promote fresh, productive ways to teach and learn that address the needs of students in this century, resulting in improved academic and well-being outcomes. These new approaches include teachers planning and teaching in teams, grouping students more flexibly, developing more coherent and comprehensive curricula, personalising student learning experiences, and providing closer teacher-student relationships. In this book we report on a three-year study of six low SES Years 7–10 secondary schools in regional Victoria, Australia, where staff and students adapted to these new settings. In researching this transitional phase, we focused on the practical reasoning of school leaders, teachers and students in adapting organisational, pedagogical, and curricular structures to enable sustainable new learning environments. We report on approaches across the different schools to structural organisation of students in year-level groupings, distributed leadership, teacher and pre-service teacher professional learning, student advocacy and wellbeing, use of techno-mediated learning, personalising student learning experiences, and curriculum design and enactment. We found that these new settings posed significant challenges for teachers and students and that successful adaptation depended on many interconnected factors. We draw out the implications for successful adaptation in other like settings.

From the author of the successful 150 Best series comes the debut entry in the forward-thinking Open Concept Houses series, filled with nearly 500 pages of color photos—sure to become the ultimate resource for this fast-growing trend in home design and renovation. One of the hottest lifestyle trends today, open concept living spaces eliminate doorways and walls to create a large combined area for cooking, dining, entertaining, and relaxing. No longer are the kitchen, dining room, and living room compartmentalized. Instead, each space blends into the next to create one large area "separated" and defined by islands, carpets, and furniture. This increasingly popular style provides a sense of expansiveness, connectedness, and flow that traditional architecture and design—defined by spaces broken by walls—lack. This engaging, inspiring, and informative volume brings together a diverse collection of houses from all over the world, including spaces that have been designed from the ground up or have been renovated to reflect this popular trend. Inside Open Concept Houses you’ll find an array of beautiful and creative homes by distinguished international architects and designers who have conceived practical and functional solutions adapted to the specific needs and particular tastes of their clients. Filled with hundreds of full-color photographs as well as sets of floorplans for renovated residences—both the original and remodeled blueprints—this imaginative, idea-filled book is a must-have for architects, designers, decorators, and home owners looking to create or adapt the open concept style in their own dwellings.

This book is envisioned as a broad-based guide for a wide array of school officials, school boards of education, school administrators, school maintenance personnel, educational consultants, students of school administration, facilities directors and school architects. The text is organized so that readers may refer to the sections that are of high interest to them. Part of this book deals with curriculum development - principles of learning applicable to the planning of school facilities that promise innovations in educational methodology. Another part concentrates on the process and activities related to the identification of educational needs for the foreseeable future. A third focus of this publication is on the actual planning of a specific type of school facility that has been recommended by the School Board. Such a recommendation by school officials may involve the construction of a new facility or the modernization of an existing school building. A fourth section deals with the strategies of getting a levy committee organized and set up to pass a school bond referendum. A new chapter (6) was added in this sixth edition on the 10 Year Long Range Facility Plan [LRFP] that will assist the readers with advance planning for enhanced success on the passing of school bond/referendums. This text includes many resources for the maintenance & operation of a school building and various techniques for saving energy.

As a developmental psychologist with a strong interest in children's re sponse to the physical environment, I take particular pleasure in writing a foreword to the present volume. It provides impressive evidence of the con cern that workers in environmental psychology and environmental design are displaying for the child as a user of the designed environment and indi cates a recognition of the need to apply theory and findings from develop mental and environmental psychology to the design of environments for children. This seems to me to mark a shift in focus and concern from the earlier days of the interaction between environmental designers and psy chologists that occurred some two decades ago and provided the impetus for the establishment of environmental psychology as a subdiscipline. Whether because children-though they are consumers of designed environments are not the architect's clients or because it seemed easier to work with adults who could be asked to make ratings of environmental spaces and comment on them at length, a focus on the child in interaction with en vironments was comparatively slow in developing in the field of environ ment and behavior. As the chapters of the present volume indicate, that situation is no longer true today, and this is a change that all concerned with the well-being and optimal functioning of children will welcome.