Is this a prison? No, this is my former middle school.
Is this a prison? No, this is my former middle school.
Batchelor Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, USA.
Ironically, there were very few walls inside. Classrooms were separated by accordion dividers which could be pulled back to connect three classrooms into one big classroom. There were no back walls to these classrooms, just a huge opening at the back. I'm told that's been changed in a renovation.
Bloomington, IN
Ah, yes, everything makes sense. I did my stint at Elkhart Memorial.
Reminds me of an ancient bad joke
What's the difference between school and prison
Schools don't have bars on the windows
I’m assuming it was built in the 60s or 70s. Most government buildings of the time were designed like that. It’s a style called brutalism.
It was built in the 70s, and there is plenty of other brutalist architecture in Bloomington because limestone and brutalism work well together and Bloomington is surrounded by limestone quarries.
But I still think that's a little over the top evil for a middle school.
I mean the IU main library across town has no windows and looks far less evil.
I didn't go to Bachelor, but had friends that did. One of my youth football teams practiced in the fields there and yeah, I always that Bachelor looked like a prison.
I used to fly in helicopters for a living (now just work on them) and we would occasionally make "ferry flights," flying an aircraft to some other area of the country. The pilots and I would regularly play "school or prison" and in some places it was reeeeeeally difficult to tell and required a Google Maps check.
It's always the brutralist buildings
Wow, that made me go and lookup my old middle school. It's pretty similar, a no windows, all brick building in N. Texas. IIRC quite a few of the classrooms had movable walls, I guess to adjust for class sizes/subjects. It was all flourescent lighting and recycled moldy air. I think I had a runny nose and itchy eyes all through middle and high school due to allergies
It appears to have way more windows than my school did lol
I remember a teacher once explained to the class schools and prisons share several design features.
They're durable withiut sharp edges, so destructive morons can do little damage to the buildings ir themselves, they use those flickering white lights that drain the energy from you, and they're designed to hold mass amounts of people who dont want to be there, supervised by a much smaller amount of people.
Both in form and in function, there isn't that much of a difference.
Except insofar as people in prison (usually) did something to belong there.