For many years, practically all elementary and junior high schools in Taiwan were built to the same cookie-cutter specifications: A massive school gate with a statue of Chiang Kai-shek or Sun Yat-sen in the entryway, flower beds positioned symmetrically on either side. Passing through the lobby, you arrive at a playing field. The classroom buildings form either a square or three sides of a square, with one side left open.

For those with this image imprinted firmly in mind, the schools that have been rebuilt since the 921quake will definitely offer surprises. Take, for instance, Tuniu Elementary School in Shihkang, Taichung County. It has a sloping red roof; exposed azure pipes; blue, purple and yellow outer walls for the classroom buildings; peach floors; red and green stairwells; dark blue pillars in the corridors; green railings; and picture windows that cover one-third of the walls. Vibrant color and striking moving lines are the dominant aesthetic.

Paradise next to rice paddies

A salient feature of the schools rebuilt since the 921 quake is that they break the bounds of traditional school architecture. Hohsing Elementary School in Chungliao, Nantou County, which is surrounded by the Chiuerfen Mountains, completely collapsed during the quake. Now it is a small wooden school set amid the paddy fields. It has a wood frame, with beech floors, and exterior walls made of treated rot-resistant pine that was imported from Canada. Its 30-some students take off their shoes before they enter, stepping across gleaming floors. The school also has its own gardens, which give the children a chance to get their hands dirty and to help grow vegetables.

The Shuiwei Elementary School, which isn't far from the Chungtai Temple in Puli, has a self-consciously "green" design that emphasizes water.

Chen Yung-hsing, the Atelier Zo architect who planned the school, uses natural features on the campus grounds as well as the built environment of winding corridors, courtyards, ponds, stage, paths and stairs to create a varied sense of space. A key to the school's atmosphere is that the classrooms at Shuiwei resemble homes. Outside every one there is a place to store shoes and raingear and even a small tub for washing dirty feet. Children can take off their shoes and socks and get comfortable in class. In every classroom there is a reading corner that feels like a home's cozy study. Bathrooms are near the classrooms, so young children without full control over their bladders won't have to run down halls in desperation.

The corridors in the classroom buildings, meanwhile, resemble streets, with lounging and playing areas designed to match the ages of the children using them. Students in the younger grades can lie down and nap right next to their classrooms.

A stress on nature is everywhere apparent. Even the roof has flowerbeds and a lookout platform. The open campus plan allows people from the neighborhood to take strolls around the grounds, including during the evenings.

Not to be rushed

In October of last year there was an exhibition of new school designs at the National Science and Technology Museum, which offered the public a look at the schools put up after the quake. "The biggest source of surprise was that the school designs showed such variety," says Leu Chin-wen, an architect who is chairman of the New Schools Movement Association.

The large number of schools destroyed by the 921 quake caused widespread concern about the structural integrity of schools generally, and it was from this concern that the new schools movement sprang.

In October 1999 the Humanistic Education Foundation, NTU's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, and Atelier Zo (which had designed Ilan's Chinshui Park), as well as various citizen's groups, formed a working committee to plan new schools.

They looked askance on the Ministry of Education pledge to award contracts for reconstructing schools in the disaster area by no later than March 24, 2000. "There's an old Chinese expression that applies here, notes Leu: 'It takes 10 years to grow a tree, but 100 years to educate a man.' Generation after generation will use these schools, so there wasn't any need to be overly hasty just to meet some bureaucrat's schedule."

After the presidential elections in May of 2000, the Ministry of Education formally proposed that the ideals of the new schools movement guide the reconstruction of schools in the earthquake disaster zone. The hope was that top-level architects would be invited to design schools, work from which they been largely excluded previously.

The spirit behind the movement was a desire to open the design of schools to all of the nation's architects, with an emphasis on participatory design along with an open and fair process for awarding the work to architectural firms and contractors. Architects responded enthusiastically. The first stage of construction for 24 schools received 198 proposals, or about eight competing design proposals for each school. It's a very high figure for a public works project in Taiwan.

"When building a school, there are many different aspects to consider, and you've got to discuss them closely with the users. But in the past this process had been completely neglected," says Lee Chyi-ran. Lee was formerly a special assistant to the mayor of Hsinchu and was responsible for implementing the plans for Hsinchu's Yangkuang and Chiushe elementary schools. He was subsequently hired as a school reconstruction consultant by the Humanistic Education Foundation.

For instance, Liu Mao-jung, a member of the Teachers' Association for Yenho Junior High School (Chunshan, Nantou County), points out that the original design called for a three-story staircase in which you could see between the steps. But women teachers pointed out that this might provide views of the girls' underwear, and so the architects redesigned it into a more conventional-style staircase.

Returning to childhood memories

There are several other features shared by these "new schools movement" designs. For instance, the schools in Tuniu, Shuiwei and Hohsing are not enclosed by campus walls, and their athletics fields are without reviewing stands. As a result, the campuses have a less forbidding atmosphere, and the children have more flexibility over how they spend their recesses. The schools have a warm, homey feeling.

At the beginning of the design process teachers didn't know what they wanted, but discussion meetings eventually stimulated their thinking processes. In order to give the principals and teachers a better understanding of design options, Tseng Shu-cheng (associate professor of architecture at Tamkang University), Shih Ying (managing director of the Humanistic Education Foundation), and others led 30-some members of the planning group to look at schools in Japan, Ilan and Taipei.

When visiting Kasahara and Nakago in Japan, the teachers finally understood for themselves that a school could be like a home, and that children could take their shoes off and get their toes dirty in the mud during recess. They also learned that schools needn't have walls and awe-inspiring entrances. These travel experiences stimulated the teachers' imaginations, with the result that discussions became more impassioned and designs more varied.

"During the planning process, we conducted a lot of interviews and made a lot of observations, trying to take the perspective of children and to uncover our own memories of what it was like to have a child's body," says Chen Yung-hsing, an Atelier Zo designer. "In designing any kind of space, you have to consider things from the user's perspective." Chen explains how sinks and urinals were placed at varying heights to meet the needs of kids of different heights.

What's more, because elementary school kids are still developing their five senses, a variety of materials should be employed to stimulate the children's imaginations. For instance, in places that are within range of hand contact, the architects used wood, brick, mud, ceramics tile, and stone. They also used a variety of colors, stained glass, and materials that change their appearance in light and in shadow in order to provide visual stimulation.

Everyone a designer

Although the designs have met with great approval from the outside world, the design process was very hard, and the architects had to overcome a host of obstacles.

For instance, although every school had a reconstruction committee, "we architects worried that these were empty shells, just filled up with names of people who were assigned to them," recalls Leu Chin-wen. "So we would enter the process and make proposals to try to get the committee members to express their hopes and thoughts."

"What most depressed people was that three months weren't enough for the planning process," says Leu. Under the pressures of time, many architects were concerned about compromising on quality. But for the most part, the architects who worked on these schools have felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment, for they believe that they were able to realize the ideals of their profession.

Tseng Shu-cheng, who was on the committee to select architects, explains that after the schools were built there was immediately a series of problems because the students and faculty were unaccustomed to the new style. For instance, some schools assumed that exposed steel bars meant that work hadn't been completed. This was confusion that stemmed from differences in aesthetic sensibilities. Some principals requested that their offices be placed where there was better fengshui. And there were even some schools, fearful for campus security, which had window bars installed where there were none in the design. To avoid such miscues, Tseng encouraged architects to return to the schools to explain their projects.

Thirty-nine schools participated in the planning process, and citizen groups also expended a lot of energy on behalf of the schools.

Without bureaucratic red tape, private groups were able to get things done at a much faster pace. The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Foundation has "adopted" 49 schools under its "hope project." In addition to providing quake victims with shelter, Tzu-Chi's Master Cheng Yen thought that they ought to be able to help the children get back to school sooner. As a result, the whole process of adopting schools, from fundraising to contracting, has been handled with great efficiency-to the point where there were even cases of deciding upon projects on one day and signing contracts with businesses to carry them out the next.

Take, for instance, Chihcheng Elementary school in Chungliao. Its design is based on the idea of an eastward-facing traditional Taiwanese sanheyuan farmhouse (which has a square courtyard that is open on one side and enclosed on three by the main hall and its two wings). The school has a simple layout, with its classrooms connected by corridors. Doorways are constructed out of decorative cinderblocks and banisters out of stainless steel molded into plant motifs and matched with wooden railings. Outer walls are decorated with round, square, rectangular and cloud-shaped openings.

The new schools movement allows for discussion over the course of the planning process, which allows users to request features and modifications suited to the educational mission of the buildings. The schools that were adopted by charitable organizations are filled with a sense of peace.

New space, new creativity

After seeing a few of the new schools, Han Pao-teh, who is regarded as the doyen of Taiwan architects, said that while education has been transformed in Taiwan over the course of a decade, campus architecture had been completely overlooked. The 921 quake, he believes, was the gods' harsh way of exposing school buildings' various shortcomings.

Han points out that when the earthquake destroyed campuses it didn't necessarily mean that there would be opportunity for reform. "As was their wont, the locally well-connected were lining up for a piece of the pie." But the Ministry of Education resisted the traditional pressures to award contracts locally, and this played a key role in allowing the new schools design agenda to move forward.

Former education minister Ovid Tzeng has affirmed that the new schools movement has already produced beautiful fruit. He hopes they are "fruits of forgetting" that will wipe away all memory of the terror caused by the quake. Let us also hope that they will prove to be "seeds of creativity."

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The earthquake toppled a campus wall here, letting the sun shine in.

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Numerous citizens' groups have contributed money and energy to school reconstruction efforts. The photo shows Chihcheng Elementary School, which was "adopted" by the Tzu-Chi Foundation.

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Hohsing Elementary School, a castle-like wooden structure, offers its 30-some students a chance to dream.

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Kuanghsing Elementary School in Luku Rural Township used the model of traditional streets and sidewalk arcades to encourage interaction between the school and the people of the neighboring community.

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Paradise by the paddy fields: The Shuiwei Elementary School, with its pools, winding corridors, and courtyards, offers an educational environment of great spatial variety.