Why Newton North High School Matters

Newton, Massachusetts would have to be on anyone's short list of quintessential, prosperous suburban communities -- the kind of place where everyone's kid is above average and people think "sub-prime" refers not to home mortgages but to the meats one leaves for others at the supermarket. And, thus, if any community in New England ought to be committed to an inspiring, majestic public sphere, it's this thriving community that is due west of Boston.



Thus it is cosmically depressing to watch, from afar, as the good people of Newton attempt to devour plans to replace one of the two public high schools in the community, Newton North, with a building designed by the distinguished architect Graham Gund. The prevailing Newtonian view seems to be that $200 million is simply too much to spend on rebuilding such a crucial institution.

The project's budget has become such an issue in Newton that it has caused the current mayor not to seek reelection -- and a group of residents is mobilizing to force a referendum on whether to spend the money. In last Sunday's Boston Globe, columnist Yvonne Abraham condemns the project as "luxe," "ridiculously expensive" and redolent of "suburban excess" that other Massachusetts communities will be tempted to replicate. Her column points out that students at the current, crumblingly inadequate Newton North High School are already high achievers -- evidence, she asserts, of "how irrelevant bricks and mortar can be to a great education."

Thus does the public sphere shrivel yet further, a plumb becoming a prune in the withering glare of mass contempt for architecture. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

My six-year-old is a budding dancer whose semi-annual recitals take place in the auditorium of the high school adjacent to the town in which we live. No doubt it spawns a few true scholars ever year -- perhaps not as many as Newton North, but certainly its ratable shares. And, yet, every time I set foot in this building I am struck by how literally impossible it is to tell the difference between this building and the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility, which houses 500 medium security offenders in Berlin.

Both the school and the prison are stark, cinderblock warrens, devoid of adornment or, indeed, anything calculated to evoke notions of beauty or grace. They are value engineering taken to its ultimate extreme -- nothing there that isn't essential, lest any columnists pass through the place and use their impression of it to ignite taxpayer furor. But -- and here I intend no offense to prison inmates, whose rehabilitation and education are results devoutly to be wished -- surely a public high school deserves something more.

Okay, maybe everyone doesn't need a school designed by Graham Gund, who has FAIA after his name -- as in the American Institute of Architects' College of Fellows, the profession's certified high achievers. But the idea that a mayor, or a school district, are automatically being wasteful and self-indulgent if they commission a noted architect to design a public building is a truly pernicious public attitude.

We pour bazillions into museums, quite laudably, and nobody huffs and puffs if the architect is Ann Beha (whose firm did the new addition to the Currier Museum in Manchester) or Renzo Piano (the global starchitect whose Los Angeles County Museum recently opened). But your kid is going to spend way more time at your local high school than she will at the local art museum -- and, heck, so will you. Public schools are more than just daycare with a syllabus -- they are community hubs, abuzz with activity day and night, as in the dance recitals I mention above.

Perhaps understandably, the renderings of the Newton North High Scholl project on the web site of the Gund Partnership are not sufficiently realized to determine whether the building will be truly remarkable or just handsome. There looks to be a lot of glass, and a multi-story plan that seems to deviate notably from the tried and true. In these senses, it is not unlike the U.S. Courthouse on the Fan Pier in Boston, designed by Henry Cobb -- a rare public building of recent vintage that aspires to avoid reminding us of anywhere we have ever been before.

Sure, Newton North High School students don't need that in order to get a decent education, just like litigants don't need that to get justice. But when activities like that go on against a backdrop that is other than banal, all of us are ennobled, our successors have been bequeathed something meaningful, and it's just a little easier to summon from within us the kind of excellence that teaching and learning deserve.