Standing by the circular central staircase that is the architectural signature of the super-modern Ørestad high school in Copenhagen, principal Allan Kjær makes a sweeping gesture. He indicates the strikingly open layout of the school, Denmark's most iconic example of a modern teaching space.
This year, "Next year," he says, referring to 2012, "there will be no books. It will be the first year that students will not see a single book."
In Denmark, education laws introduced in the past two decades have dictated that schools innovate teaching methods in order to address a wider variety of learning styles. Instead of traditional classroom learning, in which a teacher stands at a blackboard and lectures the students, new curriculums emphasize teamwork and choice—so the student who likes to draw alone can retreat to a quiet corner, while more rambunctious youngsters can choose to, say, learn the alphabet by jumping up and down as they recite it. While no studies have yet been conducted to prove or refute the theory, educationalists believe more choices will make it easier for students with diverse strengths and weaknesses to learn. Working together is seen as increasingly important preparation for the modern world.
With these progressiveideas in mind, a new generation of schools are being built, or renovated. And, in order to shape a different kind of learning, they are leaving traditional spaces—like classrooms—behind. "What they do, when they build, is try to materialize ideas about learning," says Malou Juelskjær, an associate professor with the Danish School of Education at the University of Aarhus. "The question is, how to shape the future pupil, and the future citizen?"
The Ørestad high-school building answered this question with lots and lots of open space. The five-story building is essentially one large room, with just a handful of separate, glass-walled classrooms. The few other enclosed areas include the gym, which doubles as a performance space.
"We were working with a regular school building budget, and corridors are a waste of space," says architect Kim Herforth Nielsen of the Danish firm 3XN. "Then, instead of going room by room, we made a lot of open space." The idea, he says, was to facilitate a more communal education: "They can learn about working together, that two heads are better than one. They come out prepared to work in teams."
It seems to work. Because most of the school's 1,150 students are having class at any hour of the day in one large room, it would simply be too noisy to hold regular lecture-style classes. Instead, the building forces teachers to come up with a variety of teaching styles, with small-group and one-on-one work. The students, says the principal, also quickly learn to keep their voices down, out of respect for their peers.
Technology has taken on a crucial role, thanks to the building's architecture. "We didn't know when we started that computers would become so important for us," says Mr. Kjær, the principal. The school wanted to emphasize computer-based learning in any case, he says, "but after five years in this building, we see that we couldn't have our school in this building without it."
The school's staff refer to the virtual world as the "fifth room," and nearly everything that happens at the school—from lesson plans and teaching materials to "textbooks" and homework assignments—is online.
Students and teachers say they are happy. "This building invites you to change your teaching," says math and English teacher Mette Yde Toftdahl. "In a normal school, you have a classroom, and you don't even think about mixing it up." During class, she can give students an essay assignment to work on and monitor each pupil's progress from her computer. "Then, if I see something, I can send a chat message, and ask, 'Why don't you elaborate on this?' or, 'Why haven't you written anything in 10 minutes?' "
The emphasis on technology has led to other innovations. Teachers say some kids are more engaged in math if they can approach it creatively. So, instead of turning in a geometry proof, for example, the students can submit a podcast in which they film themselves solving the math problem. Because the space lends itself to combining classes, teachers often team up, offering students a choice of, say, working on foreign-language conversation in a group or working alone, then sending the teacher sound files.
"The advantage as a teacher is that you can prepare lessons and teach in ways that make each student take advantage of his or her strengths," says language teacher Trine Prang Nielsen. "You also get inspired by your colleagues."
"Of course," adds Ms. Toftdahl, "the students have to learn basic grammar. It's not just podcasts."
Architect Dorte Mandrup-Poulsen, of Dorte Mandrup Architects, has also worked with designing school buildings according to the Danish education system's new requirements. "There's the idea, if you change the physical surroundings, you would change ways of learning," she says. "As architects, we interpret those agendas."
In her experience, changing the spaces children spend time in has an impact on development. When she built the Skanderborggade day-care center in 2005, she solved the problem of how to include enough outdoor space by creating a hill that the one- and two-year olds crawl or climb up from the ground floor in order to reach the rooftop play area. Beanbags dot the incline, so every tumble ends softly. "The school's director said they were developing [motor skills] much more quickly than in a regular school," she says.
In 2006, her firm began renovating the Munkegaard School, built by internationally renowned architect Arne Jacobsen in 1949. A protected building, the school is considered one of Jacobsen's great architectural works. But in addition to needing basic repairs and updates, the individual classrooms no longer meshed with the open, flexible floor plan considered best in Denmark today. "They needed more open space," says Ms. Mandrup-Poulsen, "to facilitate things like bringing two classes together to do a project."
To solve the problem, she built a new, underground area with lots of wide-open, multiuse space. "The idea is that you should work more according to children's ways of learning," she says. "Children have to be very resourceful, to decide, 'How would I like to learn?' "
Ms. Juelskjær of Danish School of Education says this is the point. "These ideas are trying to create a pupil who is able to do more things on their own, to ask themselves, do I need help? Can I do this on my own, or would it be better in a group? There's a larger responsibility on the child to get the job done."
Ultimately, these schools are also trying to benefit society at large. For the Faroe Islands Education Center, architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm, BIG, have designed a building—due to begin construction in April—that integrates the academic high school, the business school and the technical school in order to bring together segments of society that tend not to overlap.
And wider society appears to be catching on: 3XN's Mr. Nielsen says he brings all kinds of clients to see the Ørestad high-school building. That structure has already been used as a model for a town hall in the Netherlands and a bank building in Copenhagen. "Clients are inspired by the school," he says. In fact, he says, he believes in the open space set-up so much that he implements it in his own firm. "I don't even have my own office," he says. "Everyone can follow what I'm doing."