Nearly three decades in education architecture have taught Lois Smith that the best projects begin with listening, are strengthened by trust, and are measured by how well they continue to serve their communities long after construction is complete.
For Lois Smith, architecture has always been about more than buildings.
It began with a simple observation: space matters.
Long before she specialised in education, Lois recognised that the spaces people occupy influence how they feel, behave and interact. When she joined Bickerton Masters in 1997, she discovered a sector where that principle could have an immediate and lasting impact – education.
“What can be better than designing space for people where it’s going to have a direct influence on developing these kids?” Lois reflects.
That realisation shaped a career spanning almost 30 years and an extraordinary depth of experience across independent schools, masterplanning, new campuses, refurbishments and staged developments.
Today, although retired from day-to-day practice, Lois remains an important part of the Bickerton Masters board, providing the company with something that cannot be taught quickly or replicated easily: deep institutional knowledge, sector expertise and the perspective that comes from having seen generations of school projects evolve.
Listen first. Design second.
One of the defining characteristics of Lois’s approach is deceptively simple: listen before designing.
She has never been someone who arrives at a project with a preconceived idea about what a school should look like.
“Tell me about your school. Tell me what it is that you want to achieve in this space,” she says.
For Lois, the role of the architect is not simply to deliver what a client initially asks for. It is to understand why they want it, challenge assumptions where necessary, and help uncover opportunities the client may not have considered.
Experience, she believes, has made her better at asking those questions.
“You know you’ve asked a good question when the client goes, ‘Oh, I haven’t thought about that.’”
That moment is important. It is where architecture moves beyond responding to a brief and begins to create genuine value.
A successful project, in Lois’s view, is therefore not the result of an architect simply executing a client’s instructions. It grows from a partnership where both sides trust each other enough to explore ideas, question assumptions and consider different possibilities.
The importance of trust
For Lois, the most successful projects have a common characteristic: trust and respect.
Not as abstract values, but as practical foundations for better decision-making.
“When there’s a level of shared trust, you just get to have conversations and understand things differently,” she explains.
Without that trust, projects can become transactional – a series of instructions, responses and approvals. With it, the conversation becomes more fluid and strategic.
Lois points to a College project as a powerful example of what long-term relationships can achieve. Her relationship with the school began almost 30 years ago, when she first met its principal while the school was considering its architectural team.
Bickerton Masters was appointed, and the relationship has continued across generations of projects and school leadership.
That longevity is significant.
A school is not simply a client commissioning a building. It is a living organisation with a community, a history, a culture and a future. The best architectural relationships therefore extend well beyond a single project.
As Lois puts it, one of the most rewarding things is being able to work with a school where “you don’t have to explain it” – where the architect understands the context, the challenges and the language of education.
The decisions you cannot undo
Perhaps one of Lois’s strongest lessons from decades of education projects is that some decisions matter far more than others.
Chief among them is where a building sits.
On a greenfield school site, it can be tempting to think there is plenty of room. But those early decisions can determine the opportunities available to the school decades later.
“You can successfully refurb buildings if there’s really major changes to how you want to use them, but you can’t move them.”
It is a deceptively straightforward observation, but one that sits at the heart of good masterplanning.
Lois reflects on a particular College project as an example of how early decisions can have lasting consequences. Buildings constructed during the school’s early development occupied significant areas of the site, ultimately limiting opportunities for future facilities.
The lesson is not that every early building decision must be perfect. Rather, it is that schools need to think beyond the immediate project and understand how today’s investment may affect tomorrow’s possibilities.
That is why Lois sees masterplanning as so important.
A good masterplan is not simply a picture of what a school might look like in 20 years. It is a framework for managing growth, investment, funding, cash flow and change.
Designing for flexibility
Future-proofing is another recurring theme in Lois’s thinking.
Education changes. Technology changes. Teaching models change. Student needs change. Funding arrangements change.
The buildings need to be able to change with them.
One example is a project at Somerville House, where a library needed to be delivered quickly through the Building the Education Revolution program, despite occupying land ultimately intended for a future boarding house.
The solution was to design the library so that its structural grid and concrete construction could accommodate future development above it – while retaining the flexibility to adapt the space if circumstances changed.
It was a relatively small design decision with potentially enormous long-term consequences.
For Lois, that is the essence of future-ready design: not trying to predict exactly what the future will look like, but making sure today’s decisions do not unnecessarily prevent tomorrow’s options.
“You have to try and think about what’s in front of you and the ‘what ifs’,” she says.
But she also cautions against allowing future-proofing to become an excuse for conservative design.
“If you’re too sensible, you just stamp down creativity.”
The challenge is finding the balance between being responsible and leaving room for imagination.
Understanding the school behind the building
Another important lesson from Lois’s career is that good education architecture requires an understanding of how a school actually operates.
The operational details can sometimes seem insignificant, but they can have a profound influence on whether a building works.
Take school toilets.
Children may have an entire lunch break to use them, but experience tells Lois that many will wait until the final few minutes before heading there.
Or consider a science building, where the location of preparation areas, chemical storage, ventilation and specialist equipment can fundamentally influence how the building needs to work.
Or a library, where the traditional concept of a room full of books has evolved into something much more fluid – a resource centre that can support collaboration, technology, different teaching modes and changing patterns of learning.
These insights come from experience.
They are the small pieces of institutional knowledge that accumulate across hundreds of conversations, projects and observations.
And they matter because the architect is not designing an abstract building. They are designing a place that needs to work for real people, every day.
The school is a community
Perhaps one of Lois’s most important reflections is that architects must never lose sight of the fact that a school is a community.
A principal is not simply managing a building project. They are managing teachers, students, families, staff, boards, finances, educational outcomes and the expectations of an entire community.
That changes the way an architect needs to work.
The business manager and principal are often making major project decisions while simultaneously managing their core responsibilities.
“They’ve still got their day job,” Lois says.
That means architects need to respect their time and make the process as clear, efficient and considered as possible.
It also means understanding that decisions about a new building can feel very personal.
Lois recalls speaking with a school principal who found the process of reviewing the design for a new hall unexpectedly stressful. She was accustomed to making major decisions every day, yet suddenly found herself making decisions about a building that would become part of her school’s identity for decades.
The lesson is simple: architects are asking people to make decisions in a world that may be unfamiliar to them.
Part of the architect’s responsibility is therefore to provide the information, context and confidence required to make those decisions well.
Solving the problems clients cannot solve themselves
This is perhaps where Lois’s experience becomes most valuable.
Schools often know what they want to achieve, but they do not necessarily know how to solve the complex physical, operational, financial or planning problems that stand between them and that outcome.
That is where architecture adds value.
Sometimes the challenge is a constrained site.
Sometimes it is staging construction around an operating school.
Sometimes it is funding.
Sometimes it is an existing building that no longer meets the school’s needs.
Sometimes it is simply a question that nobody has thought to ask.
The architect’s role is to bring experience to those problems and create possibilities.
And importantly, Lois believes architects do not always recognise the significance of what they have solved.
A difficult site constraint might seem like just another problem to an experienced architect. To the client, it may have been the problem that stood between them and achieving their vision.
That is one of the reasons experience matters so much.
The value of long-term thinking
For Lois, education architecture has never been about designing a building in isolation.
It is about understanding where a school has come from, where it is going and what it may need along the way.
That means thinking about masterplanning, funding, staging, operations, community, growth and flexibility – while still creating places that inspire students and staff today.
It also means recognising that a successful project is not necessarily the one that looks most impressive on completion day.
Sometimes the greatest compliment comes years later.
Lois describes walking through older projects with schools as part of subsequent funding processes and hearing:
“This space is eight years old and it still works just as well as it ever did.”
That, she says, is one of the best measures of success.
Not novelty. Not ego. Not simply how a building looked when it opened.
But whether it continues to work.
Experience that continues to shape Bickerton Masters
Lois’s contribution to Bickerton Masters today is therefore much bigger than her history with the practice.
Her experience provides perspective.
Her knowledge provides context.
Her questions challenge assumptions.
And her understanding of education provides an important reference point as the practice continues to evolve.
After almost three decades in the sector, Lois’s philosophy remains remarkably consistent: listen carefully, understand the problem, ask better questions, build trust and design with the future in mind.
That consistency is perhaps the greatest lesson of all.
Architecture changes. Technology changes. Funding models change. Education changes.
But the fundamentals of good design remain.
Understand people. Understand the place. Understand the problem. And create something that continues to serve its purpose long after the architect has left the site.
For Bickerton Masters, having that depth of experience represented at board level ensures that the lessons of the past continue to inform the decisions of the future.
And that is the real value of experience.
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