How to recognise a building

How to recognise a building 

It happens all the time: while driving through some unknown part of the Netherlands, in the periphery of my vision, some building catches my attention and immediately I know it's a school, a civic building or something other than the housing that dominates the urban environment. I don't have to think about it, I just directly know it. Scale, proportions, fenestration and other features make it evident that the building belongs to a particular use type.

So I wonder how far this goes, whether most people can recognise buildings like than and where it comes from: from earlier experiences with different buildings or from fundamental differences in form. This is an intriguing subject, especially because quite a lot doesn't seem to come from direct personal experience: if you ask a Dutch child to draw a house, they'll most probably draw an outline they've learned from books, with the roof pitch visible from the side rather than the front, as in the usual Dutch row housing.

Constraints and types

Constraints and types 

In the presentation of a school building (http://www.archdaily.com/314984/school-in-tarragona-batlle-i-roig-arquitectes), the architects make an interesting point: the commissioning of schools is highly regulated with respect to various constraints, a situation that leads to certain spatial types that are repeated again and again. Interestingly, the architects manage to find both merit  (in relation to the state of the economy at the time) and a design challenge (refinement of the types with respect to general goals and the particular context) in this situation.

Looking at their results, it is a typical instance of a straight double corridor with an entrance and staircase roughly in the middle; it has two main levels, with the gym in a separate wing behind the main slab. It is a design remarkable in the first instance only by its adherence to the corridor school type. The architects claim to have tried to make the school compact for economic reasons and to have minimised fenestration (which nevertheless remains quite generous, as we are used to in schools) for climatic reasons. Going through the presentation, I find myself nodding in agreement. I may not remember the design for long but I'm positively inclined towards it. If I'm ever in the neighbourhood, I'll try and visit the school.