According to some predictions, 65 percent of preschoolers today will hold jobs that do not yet exist. Whether such statistical forecasts are precisely accurate, it’s undeniable that technology and pedagogical approaches are in flux, challenging age-old models for classrooms with tidy rows of students facing a teacher in front. Ideas that learning can happen more effectively in other ways—with, for example, less formal clusters, in self-paced and interactive modes—have increasingly permeated the mainstream. “It’s become clear that schools need to be designed to accommodate long-range unknowns, as well as spatial needs that shift even over the course of an ordinary school day,” says architect John Dale, principal of HED and cofounder of the Council on Open Building (OB), which advocates for nimble adaptability of architecture, as well as of entire cities. Dale was eager to apply OB principles to an educational facility from the ground up—the first in the U.S.—and that opportunity came with the 260,000-square-foot Discovery building that HED designed, in collaboration with Moore Ruble Yudell (MRY), for Santa Monica High School, the public institution affectionately known as Samohi. But the versatility of this project, begun in 2017, was put to the test sooner than expected. By opening day, in August 2021, Discovery’s resilient interiors had been readily reconfigured for the social distancing, reduced class sizes, and ventilation adjustments the pandemic demanded. “What we accomplished would not have been possible in our old building,” says Carey Upton, chief operating officer of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, in Los Angeles County.