In the United States, as of 2024, there is an average of one school shooting every other week of the school year.1 With these issues prevalent and gun control laws and regulations far from being enacted in any way, many schools and community spaces across the United States are prompted to redesign in order to protect their students and community members. However, the social impact that these redesigns may have, while enacted with good intentions, could greatly affect student life in America.
The New Design
One example of a school renovation is Fruitport High School, located on the west coast of Michigan. With a cost of $48 million, the school’s layout includes curved hallways to break up sightlines, little nooks and half walls to create cover, and impact resistant glass installed into every door and window.2 The design also features a front desk with a view of the single, secure main entrance in and out of the building, described by the architectural firm who designed the space, TowerPinkster, as reminiscent of a “Panopticon”.3 Though intended to create a feeling of security and safety within its walls, the design has the unintended effect of brewing uncertainty.
Designing for violence may address the current safety related concerns surrounding school shootings in America, but changing these spaces that are meant for students to learn and grow in to instead focus on protection shifts the atmosphere of the environment as a whole. For example, adding cover fundamentally recontextualizes the space you’re in- if it exists, it was built for a reason, and since it was built, it was meant to be used. Anyone familiar with a shooting-related video game will subconsciously recognize these spaces as places of danger, where something bad is about to happen and the half-walls that otherwise serve no purpose will fulfill their role. These small design changes recontextualize schools as dangerous combat zones, where cover is necessary and the first thought on any student’s mind should be what they can dive behind should the need arise.
Similarly, increasing security in schools, through the single observed Wentrance and exit and addition of extra security cameras—or even in some cases security guards and metal detectors—heightens feelings of anxiety and fear in students, as well as reduces their privacy and comfort levels in the learning environment. Even the reference to the front desk as a ‘Panopticon’ supports this, with the design originally used in prison complexes so one guard could observe every prisoner at once. As the superintendent of Fruitport, Robert Syzmoniak, has stated, the school was designed “so there aren’t too many places where a kid can be that the eyes of an adult could not be on that kid”.4 Though these measures were taken to improve safety, they lessen individuality and create a sense of distrust and suspicion that fragments the community, negatively affecting students’ experience.
The Impact
These school redesigns, while having good intentions, fail to target the real root issue of gun violence and instead lean into the narrative of schools as a danger zone that students should be fearful to study in. In preparing for the scenario in which gun violence occurs, and designing around this concept, gun violence further embeds itself in the narrative as an expectation of life in America, an inevitability like any natural disaster or freak accident. Following this logic, these designs promote both the destruction of space and the dismantling of student communities. Walls designed against being torn apart by bullet holes invoke feelings of unsafety and suspicion, with students too focused on survival to create meaningful connections with each other. Structure designed against destruction instead redirects the damage, splintering the threads intertwining the students, further progressing feelings of isolation and the dissolving of a community.
Architecture reflects culture, and culture affects architecture. This intertwined and varied interplay between the spaces we spend our day-to-day lives in, and the way in which we interact with each other and ourselves, emphasizes how horrific it is that a place for a 14 year old to learn algebra necessitates hiding places, quick escape routes, and bulletproof glass.
There should be no similarities between the spatial relationships of a combat zone and a school, but using these redesigned highschools as examples of the narrative America is telling its students, it is evident that something needs to change. Architecture affects the way we view the world, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the future students of the United States need not grow up learning to expect violence.
- Based on the statistic of 83 school shootings in 2024 and an average of 36 school-weeks per year. Source: Matthews, Alex. “School Shootings in the US: Fast Facts.” CNN, Cable News Network, 11 Feb. 2025. ↩︎
- Gibson, Eleanor. “Michigan High School Designed to Reduce Impact of Mass Shootings.” Dezeen, 5 Sept. 2019. ↩︎
- Horton, Alex. “A New High School Will Have Sleek Classrooms — and Places to Hide from a Mass Shooter.” Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2019. ↩︎
- Chambers, Jennifer. “Michigan School Designed to Foil Shooters: ‘It Slows Them Down.’” The Detroit News, 8 Jan. 2020. ↩︎