Safety and Exposure in Transparent School Interiors: Patterned User Perceptions of Glass

Abstract

This paper examines user perceptions of glass in a Midwestern high school in the U.S. that exemplifies a new generation of school buildings using transparent interior features both to support social connections and to allow for the informal supervision of students. It is well known that occupants often try to reestablish spatial boundaries that architects had attempted to dematerialize with the use of glass, yet the discourse of transparency typically focuses on architects’ intentions and excludes user perceptions. The impact of transparent barriers on social behavior is still poorly understood (Marquardt et al., 2015). This ethnographic case study seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge. It finds a wide range of strong emotional responses, depending on participants’ levels of vulnerability and their roles at school. Reactions range from feelings of anxiety to feelings of control.
The author proposes to increase stakeholders’ comfort levels by providing school users with opportunities to adjust transparency levels in educational buildings, much as they can commonly adjust light levels. Future environmental design research studies of school buildings will be able to use the current findings to inform refined research questions and research instruments in order to deepen our understanding of occupants’ perceptions and behavioral responses to transparent features in institutional architecture.

Keywords: school buildings, family functioning, transparency, user perceptions, health and safety, latent class analysis, non-classroom spaces