AUSTIN, Texas—Architect LPA has designed a three-story middle school for students in Austin’s northeastern side as well as in the adjacent city of Mueller. The school, which will be under the umbrella of the Austin Independent School District, will be situated on the site of Mueller’s now-defunct airport as part of a multiphase redevelopment plan for the 10-acre site. The reimagining is called the Mueller Development.

The campus will be home to nearly a thousand students in what LPA has envisioned as a flexible learning space so that education can take place anywhere, not merely inside a classroom. Accordingly, the architectural design offers collaborative breakout rooms, technology-supported spaces as well as “activated” outdoor spaces.

The 130,000-square-foot campus will sit on the former airport’s runway. It will be built up to LEED Gold standards, with roofs that can readily be set up for solar powering and environmentally friendly materials throughout the campus. Recycled water will be utilized to irrigate the grounds as well.

On the exterior, a streamlined courtyard will join together the various learning and activity environments as a “central park” of social areas. The campus is meant to blend seamlessly into the Mueller community itself thanks to bike lanes and sidewalks. Thus the campus will be an asset not just for the students and staff but also for the surrounding community, with people nearby allowed to use the campus’s library, dining commons, gymnasium, roof deck and track field.

To maintain the connection with the site’s former iteration as an airport, the gymnasium is being designed to look like an aircraft hangar. Furthermore, signage to assist with campus wayfinding will feature aerial motifs.

“LPA and Joeris General Contractors worked together through the integrated design-build delivery method to ensure that AISD’s priorities across stakeholders were balanced in the design,” Drew Johnson, director of bond planning and project controls for the AISD Construction Management Department, said in a recent statement. “That process of engaged listening ultimately led to a project that we are all excited to see come into reality and begin impacting the students it is intended for.”

“This school is the direct result of a wonderful collaborative process with educators and the community,” LPA design director Kate Mraw said recently. “AISD really trusted the design team to develop a design that is educationally innovative, environmentally responsible and contextually beautiful.”

Added Federico Cavazos, project architect at LPA: “The design recognizes the importance of planning the campus like a city. Our experience in mixed-use developments really helped us combine the goals of the school and community.”

The site redevelopment of the former airport was a design-build project designed by Coleman Landscape Architects working in coordination with Jeoris General Contractors. Construction is now underway and projected to be finished by the fall of 2023.

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SAN JOSE, Calif.—The Northern California Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) has opened the doors of both the Abram Agnew Elementary School and Dolores Huerta Middle School in San Jose. Architecture firm LPA designed both schools, which are both part of a larger effort to create an entire campus for grades K through 12 at one location. The Agnew and Huerta schools represent the first phase in that larger project.

Representatives of LPA, SCUSD and construction manager Swinerton were all present at a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony. Also in attendance were state Senator Bob Wieckowski, whose district includes the campus, as well activist Dolores Huerta, for whom the middle school is named.

“These schools are many years in the making, and we are honored to have collaborated with the district and Swinerton, our construction partner, to bring them to life,” David Eaves, studio director at LPA, said at the ribbon-cutting. “The campus will support the academic and social growth of students for generations.”

Added Huerta: “I know what all of us are thinking: I wish I could’ve gone to this school.”

Also speaking at the ribbon-cutting ceremony was SCUSD Superintendent Dr. Stella M. Kemp, who said that the upgraded classrooms will “rival those of our neighbors in Silicon Valley.”

Students at the new schools will learn in an environment “where people collaborate, develop solutions to real-world problems…and develop the mindset and skills to be resilient and future leaders in our community,” Kemp said.

The 55-acre campus site will also include the to-be-built Kathleen MacDonald High School, which is anticipated to open for students in the fall of 2022.

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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.

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NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—The Environmental Nature Center (ENC) and Preschool in Newport Beach recently received the COTE® Top Ten Award, the industry’s most prestigious award for environmentally sensitive, high-performance design.

Architect design firm LPA received a national COTE Top Ten award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for the design of the ENC and Preschool on the five-acre campus. Consolidated Contracting was the general contractor on this project. The project cost of the Nature Center was $4.2 million, and $6.5 million for the Preschool.

The 9,000-square-foot center opened in 2008 as the first LEED Platinum building in the region. It provides environmental education through hands-on experiences with nature. Last September, a 10,380-square-foot preschool was added to deliver nature-based education for children ages 2½ to 5 years old through a series of intuitive indoor-outdoor play and education environments.

Children tend to an organic garden and harvest the produce as part of the curriculum.

“It introduces kids to responsible sustainability at a young age and is a place where people will want to send their children,” said one of the AIA jurors in a statement.

Energy efficiency and water conservation are in every element of the facility. The butterfly-shaped roof opens the classrooms to natural light and supports a 32KW array of photovoltaic panels, which are designed to provide 105 percent of the net energy for the preschool’s electrical needs.

Natural ventilation, low-energy ceiling fans and a radiant floor heating system eliminated the need for traditional HVAC systems. Rainwater is treated as an educational tool, where water is channeled through rock basins and bioswales, and naturally treated and clarified by plant materials.

“For LPA, COTE represents the highest honor because it focuses on actual performance,” said LPA President Dan Heinfeld. “We’ve always connected performance and design excellence as one of our core values.”

Added ENC Executive Director Bo Glover, “It was extremely important for the design to mirror our sensibilities on sustainability and energy efficiency. Working with LPA gave us a unique opportunity to design a nature-based preschool from the ground up.”

The preschool was developed through an integrated design process. A holistic approach was taken to addressing the educational spaces, as well as energy and water conservation. Learning spaces throughout the facility are designed to spark creativity, cooperative learning and imagination. A blend between indoor and outdoor learning environments provides children with an intuitive understanding of nature.

“We were able to work as a unit with educators, the community and ENC leaders to develop the idea of learning through nature in a facility that reflected the group’s core mission,” explained LPA Design Director Rick D’Amato.

In addition to being certified LEED Platinum in April, the preschool is also pursuing the Living Building Challenge’s Petal Certification, one of the first projects in the region to target both a high-level of sustainability and the healthy environment standard.

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