that building could have been anything

I don't know about you, but I never thought too much about the physical structure of our high school when I was a student there. But I think about it now as I get older. Architecture figures into my lesson plans, but also my favorite television shows, among them House Hunters and House Hunters International. I now wonder about how from afar American High looked like it could be anything: a factory, a correctional facility, an office complex; heck, even a spaceship. It was, however, just a school. Save for one skylight window, I don't remember any windows. Was that deliberate? Did someone want us to stay focused on the schoolwork before us? Were they trying to minimize the energy costs by keeping out the sunlight? If so, what were the costs? For a time during the 1980s any release from the postmodern, sterile look of our high school came from the energy of the people inside (and that brightly-colored mural of birds on the Central Plaza stairwell. Remember that?).