I misunderstood the point OP was making. But even interpreting "surface area" to mean "ground area", it's only right in dense areas without open land. The reason schools are built the way they are is to optimize for cost.

Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down.

When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on.

Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.

> You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect.

Dial it back.

When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly.

I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.