Lessons Learnt

St Margaret’s Academy, West Lothian, is over 15 years old, yet avoided many of the mistakes of its predecessors – and stands up well to the passage of time and ideas. One can only imagine the moment when its architect questioned the way things were always done and decided to think again.

There may indeed be only one lesson to learn – that we need to think carefully about why we repeat ourselves. The good reason is to build on experience and not reinvent the wheel: the bad reason is because we didn’t think.

‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’. We know this. We know that we are all guilty of repeating the same mistakes. The lesson for designers is . . . think again.