The new Westminster Academy is a bit like the Cape of Good Hope: a toponymic subterfuge intended to build confidence among the wary. It's in one of the rougher parts of central London, a loser in the postcode lottery, the wrong side of the noisy, smelly Westway. It's in sight of Notting Hill, but socially and economically remote from it. This part of Paddington was described in pioneer sociologist Charles Booth's Poverty Map of London in 1898 as home to the 'vicious, semi-criminal' classes.  Nowadays, it is home to an educational constituency virtually none of whom has English as a native language. But it remains gritty, if no longer so vicious. This was a stimulus to the academy's architect Paul Monaghan of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Monaghan, a Liverpudlian whose own school was founded on a scary Christian Brothers culture of punishment and damnation, says: 'We're interested in gritty.' Happily, his interest in grit transcends the limitations of the subject.  Architects have not been bothered much by schools. In 1970, the great Nikolaus Pevsner gave the Mellon Lectures in Washington's National Gallery of Art. They were published six years later as A History of Building Types; schools did not even justify a chapter, although prisons and hotels did.  The 1870 Education Act brought some conceptual innovations in the structure of schools, including classes arranged by age. But the board schools arising from it were mostly designed with cash cost rather than human values in mind (so are, therefore, in their way richly revealing of a dominant educational psychology). Hobbled by exiguous budgets and unimaginative briefs, inflexible clients and careless inhabitants, state-school design was often boring mediocrity. Worse, stultifying crap.  There was a bold postwar experiment in Hunstanton, Norfolk, by husband-and-wife team Peter and Alison Smithson (who also designed Robin Hood Gardens, the threatened council housing complex in east London) now demonised by the architecture minister, Margaret Hodge, who does not know anything about architecture. Hunstanton was exceptional and proved a rule. Often photographed, influential among architects, not much imitated, the Hunstanton School was Modernist idealism before familiarity debased its currency.  In Sarasota, Florida, Paul Rudolph's airy, slight and spacious Riverview High School of 1957, a monument to America's late-flowering Enlightenment, is being demolished to make a car park. It is the subject of a sentimental preservation campaign, as was the Brutalist Pimlico School in London late last year.  Strange that masterpiece state schools are so rare, especially if you accept, as you surely must, the architectural argument that we form our environments and our environments form us. Certainly, in my case, the Gothic sandstone, stained glass and dark wood of a school in suburban parkland, managed by an Eton refugee who had mysteriously escaped to Liverpool, made my psychology. Somehow, school suggested stability, security and quality, but light and hope and speed were elsewhere.  Westminster Academy is the latest and most impressive of the hundred or so academies built since 2000. These may yet prove to be Tony Blair's most impressive legacy. Like most of Blair's inheritance, the idea was originally Mrs Thatcher's. Academies began as city technology colleges. Commercial sponsors would give cash and inspiration to schools failing on account of semi-vicious criminality and grit. Lord Ashworth's ADT College in Wandsworth, south London, was among the first. Seventeen years later, Westminster, with its 1,175 pupils, is the gift of David Dangoor, an Iraqi-born property developer.  Seen from the road, it is startlingly green. Five storeys of glazed terracotta from lime to holly via Gordon's Gin sit on a plinth clad in British racing green ceramic (an AC Cobra sports car was one of the sources on the designers' mood boards). 'It's just a box,' Monaghan says, 'but expensively clad.' It looks confident and optimistic. Seen from the Westway, it reads not as a punitive educational institution, but as smart and as corporate as GlaxoSmithKline.  Monaghan has kept this feeling inside. It is much more Hyatt Regency, even New York's Museum of Modern Art, than Dotheboys Hall with a reception desk and wall-mounted plasma screens, although security arrangements make you wistful for the days of the lash; the street entrance can be sealed as an airlock in the event of internal insurrection or external invasion. There is often a police officer inside stroking her stab vest. The register is taken online.  'We've picked cheap things, but thought about where they should go,' Monaghan says. There are many satisfying and ingeniously frugal architectural details: the chandelier that illuminates the insurrectionists' airlock comprises a dozen off-the-shelf fluorescent tubes hung on cable. The wonderfully colourful giant white, green and yellow baffles (or slats) that moderate the sunshine flooding in through the vast central 'light chimney' are MFI door blanks costing about £40 a pop.  The architecture both expresses and helps direct a new educational philosophy. Rigidity went the way of the cane. Academies must respect key stage testing, but do not have to follow the national curriculum. This ventilates both the style of teaching and the plan of the building. The way it was explained to me was: we don't do French language and history, we do 'Napoleon'. This way, pupils learn about motivational leadership and acquire French language and history at the same time.  The cant expression is: education must be competence-based, not subject-based, although with a billed event on spirituality from Esther Rantzen, I do not know what to make of it. To accommodate this freely structured education, large, well-lit rooms (not in any meaningful way 'class' rooms) are arranged around the perimeter of the box, facing an atrium, spacious, but unthreatening. Furniture is mid-century modern design classics by Charles Eames. There are Jasper Morrison stacking chairs, bar stools by Konstantin Grcic. Amazing, really.  Everywhere there is exposed concrete - 'so you don't waste money on a horrible suspended ceiling' - and this looks very handsome. Everywhere there are agit-prop slogans, once the province of the counterculture. Bold hyper-graphics by Studio Myerscough declaim 'Communication!' 'Global citizenship!' 'Enterprise!' In nice contrast, rooms used for business education have City buzzwords vinyl-cut on the glass. The way I used to learn Virgil, Westminster Academicians learn about 'bracket creep', 'hurdle rate' and 'gazundering'.  Outside, the site has been carefully considered as a whole. There is pleasantly textured, resin-bound aggregate underfoot and a sports centre, like all academy facilities shared with the community, is in warm and pleasant untreated larch. There is no fuel-thirsty air conditioning, but elegant mechanical air handling, which leaves a silent, sealed building. Trees are lit at night as an advertisement for a larger social role. Lavatories have twin exits to obviate threatening behaviour. Everyone gets a stand-alone or sit-alone cubicle and Monaghan has spent money on good, robust finishes because, in the long run, that's an economy.  What does Westminster say about educational architecture today? First, it says here's an interesting , emerging tradition of quality building design. Foster and Rogers have already designed academies. So too have Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Wilkinson Eyre. Westminster seems certain to be shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. Pleasant to think that a school dedicated to enterprise might excite ambitious competition among architects and sponsors, pushing buildings and pupils ever higher up a helix of growing expectations. Let's hope.  Students lunch on shawarma, fish and chips and chicken fajitas in the Sky Dining Area. So an open concept in education is matched by a splendidly uninhibited culinary curriculum, to be enjoyed on a terrace with generous views. I felt not much regret for cabbage and spotted dick.  The plan includes what architects call caves and commons, a mixture of shared, open circulation and semi-private seclusion. In the latter, study groups of troglodytes meet in caves named after world cities to contemplate Apprentice-like business tasks.  An architecture of space and light with exhilarating long views plays its part in an educational culture of openness and experiment. And everywhere there is a sense of thoughtfulness and economy. Alison Banks, the principal, said that, at its predecessor, children were sullen and given to occasional chair fights. Now the energy is altogether more positive; the building is a teacher in its own right.  Paul Monaghan had several inspirations. Bauhaus textiles influenced the layering of the ceramic facades. MC Escher prints were an ironic source for the mirror-image Scissor Stairs. 'This,' he said, waving a hand and thinking of Magritte, as I queasily remembered the horrors of Latin prep and cold showers, 'is not a school.'  Cool schools: five of the best  Mossbourne Community Academy London E8 (2004)  Richard Rogers Partnership's response to a unique IT curriculum was a V-plan in three storeys, one of the largest timber-framed buildings in Britain. Using the language of village and cloisters, the design aims to achieve 'ownership, equality and heart'.  The Michael Tippett School London SE24 (2008)  London Eye designers Marks Barfield have used colour therapeutically in this special-needs school. This is the first BSF (Building Schools for the Future) project in London, a government initiative that - at last - recognises how architectural quality can influence teaching and behaviour.  The John Madejski Academy Reading (2007)  This design by Wilkinson Eyre was chosen by the DfES as an exemplar. Learning 'clusters' are raw concrete with external clear and opaque glass curtain walls, gathered around an internal 'agora' covered by a polymer roof printed with a dot matrix. Flexible spaces are designed to accept new technologies.  The Thomas Deacon Academy Peterborough (2007)  This academy was sponsored by Perkins Engines and was designed by Foster + Partners; 2,200 pupils specialise in maths and science in a building replicating the atmosphere of a university rather than a school. The sinuous plan reflects Foster's 1970s Wills Faber & Dumas building in Ipswich.  Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios specialises in socially responsible and environmentally intelligent buildings. This wood and brick school is sited in a landscaped park intended to create the feel of an established village. SB
Sterility in school architecture has gone the way of the cane... Westminster, the most impressive of the new wave of academies, has space, light and exciting furniture that all contribute to a vibrant and optimistic educational culture