LPA Wins AIA Design Award for California School Expansion

By SCN Staff

IRVINE, Calif.—LPA recently won an Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Architects (national) Educational Facility Design Awards for the design of Tarbut V’Torah’s expansion. Only six projects in the country received this recognition.

Completed in 2018, this project was an effort to modernize the campus and re-establish the school’s prominence in Irvine, Calif. The total cost for lower school construction and upper school STEAM building was $25 million.

The campus expansion was part of a new strategic plan developed by the school’s trustees to grow the student body and re-establish Tarbut V’Torah as a premier independent school. LPA worked closely with the school’s administration and community to co-develop a program that responds to the school’s vision of future-ready learning environments.

The expansion of the campus included the addition of three new buildings—a maker building, a STEAM building, and a fitness building, in addition to outdoor learning environments. LPA’s engineers, designers and landscape architects worked with school leaders and students to develop spaces that address the social and emotional aspects of students, as well as the academic.

The school’s flexible learning environments allow for hands-on, project-based learning, indoors and out. Classrooms with glass walls open to the expansive views of the scenic Southern California community. A quad adjacent to the new buildings includes small group pods, an amphitheater and stage, evening performance lighting, a lunch terrace, an 18-foot-long concrete work bench table and a roof top huddle deck.

DPR Construction was the general contractor on this impressive project.