Contributed to “Reshaping Our Learning Landscape” for the British Council for School Environments, this essay by Prakash Nair and Annalise Gehling borrows from the urban designer Jan Gehl to ask a deceptively simple question: what happens in the life between classrooms?
Gehl spent a career studying the life between buildings — the streets, squares, and edges where a city’s social life actually unfolds. Nair and Gehling apply the same lens to schools, arguing that the corridors, thresholds, and common areas usually treated as leftover space are in fact where much of a school’s real learning and community life takes place.
From corridors to commons
Treated as mere circulation, hallways are wasted. Reimagined as public space — with daylight, places to sit, and room to gather and work — they become the school’s living room: the setting for the informal, peer-to-peer, soft-skill learning that formal classrooms rarely make room for.
Designing the in-between
The essay points toward a different way of planning schools: starting not with the classroom but with the network of public and semi-public spaces that connect everything else. When those in-between places are designed with the care a good city gives its squares, the whole school becomes a richer place to learn.