Saturday, April 11, 2009

Texas Temporary School Buildings

No, that is not a minimum security prison in the picture. What it is is windowless temporary school buildings at an elementary school I drive by when I go to the Tandy Hills.

Temp Buildings at schools are a blight all over America. I think my old home state of Washington may have had more temp school buildings than I see at Texas schools, but the Washington ones are not as bleak as the Texas ones that I've seen.

These temp buildings cost money, not as much as a permanent building, obviously, but they still cost money. Why is there not some universal design of these things, some well designed modular, easily assembled structure that has windows and does not look so prison-like.

How much would it cost to end this blight on our schools all across America? To replace all the temp eyesores with a temp building that is not an eyesore. Would it cost $1 billion? $5 billion? $10 billion? Would it cost just a small fraction of the bank bailouts? Would it not be a good stimulus investment?

Temporary school buildings have bugged me for years, way before my move to Texas. They seem like a real penny-wise, pound foolish solution to a real problem, that being having enough classroom space.

1 comment:

the_capital_t said...

Actually, some designers and architects are working on this problem. See this article:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/04/06/thoroughly_modern_modular/