Six years later, the numbers tell a different story about the site, and though they will never and should never eclipse what occurred there, they point to a future that is inherently safer and hopefully happier.

Debuted in time for the 2016-17 school year, the new, 86,800-square-foot Sandy Hook Elementary School accommodates about 450 students from kindergarten through fourth grade. It was two years in the making, following an intensive process on the part of stakeholders, including Svigals + Partners, the New Haven, Conn., firm that designed the new facility under the direction of Managing Partner Jay Brotman, AIA.

“We recognized immediately the importance of an inclusive and open design process,” said Brotman. “Before even the first drawing, we met with community officials and families to hear their concerns, to listen to what they wanted from a new school, to discover what was important to the people there about their town and to hear from them what the original elementary school meant to them.”

In the end, Brotman said his team became intimately involved with the people of Newton and as a consequence, “became very protective of them.”

From the get-go, the firm committed to an inclusive and collaborative process, which included a committee composed of Sandy Hook Elementary School teachers and staff, parents, Newtown School District staff, members of the Board of Education, town staff, community representatives and the design/construction team at its core. This body coalesced as the School Based Building Advisory Committee (SBBAC), and its involvement continued into the construction phase, said Brotman.

“We believed — rightly, I think — this would be the only way to design a school building and campus that would stand as an expression of the needs, aspirations and spirit of Newtown, Sandy Hook in particular,” said Brotman. “Schools must provide a nurturing, welcoming and healthy environment for children to learn, and they must support community activities of all kinds. In order to fulfill this dual mission, our design solutions addressing safety and security had to be seamlessly integrated into an architectural aesthetic that says, ‘Welcome, come on in and join us,’” said Brotman.

To wit, the safety measures were implemented in a manner that rendered them essentially invisible.

“For Sandy Hook Elementary School, we explored how to prevent intruders from gaining access to the building, starting with a campus plan that delineates the separation from the street and surrounding areas while directing traffic flow strategically so that potential threats may be detected early,” Brotman explained. “We also located active public areas near the front of the building towards the arrival area so that they could easily observe approaching visitors and report any unwanted activities.”

Other strategies, according to Brotman, focused on delaying a potential intruder’s progress by locating the classrooms such that they were remote from any likely points of entry. Locks and automatic doors were also engineered to impede progress, and the landscaping was designed to be eco-friendly while driving visitors toward “preferred points of entry.” The surrounding landscape also informed the design as Brotman and his team actively integrated the school into the environment.

“The local ecology and geography of the area are important to the community’s identity. Our team worked to weave inspiration from the site and its surroundings into the design, establishing physical and symbolic connections with nature, in a way that would help organize the site to address security, vehicular access, pedestrian connections and so forth,” said Brotman.

Among the safety features incorporated into the project are impact-resistant laminated glazing on a variety of strategic spots throughout the building as well as hardened interior walls and doors. The hardware on classroom doors is engineered to automatically deadbolt upon closing.

“The school building also includes a number of technological strategies such as security cameras and lighting that are motion-sensitive. But the true strength of the design is in the planning, landscaping and layout that increase the available reaction time for identifying and responding to potential intruders,” said Brotman.

To read the entire article, check out the May/June issue of School Construction News.

The post Celebrating Life & Learning: The Re-envisioned Sandy Hook Elementary appeared first on School Construction News.

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. — It’s funny to think that a generation ago, high school heroes were depicted in the movies as those canny kids who successfully avoided being on campus (looking at you Ferris Bueller). These days, with educational opportunities like Silicon Valley’s Design Tech High School in Redwood Shores sprouting up across the nation, one would be hard pressed to find a student who wouldn’t want to be there.

Known by three officially approved monikers (Design Tech High School, Design Tech and d.tech), the California public charter school is part of the San Mateo Union High School District and was founded in 2014, followed by a more recent relocation to a permanent home on the grounds of technology juggernaut Oracle’s corporate campus. The doors of the new facility opened in January 2018, and 550 students crossed the threshold to their STEM-centric studies. The school’s signature program, however, is “Design Thinking,” which is augmented with an “intersession” period when d.tech students pause their core academic classes and take a deep dive into design lab and exploration electives.

Construction of the school’s new home began in 2016 with Oracle contributing $43 million toward its construction. In addition to classrooms, meeting areas and other facilities, the heart of d.tech’s campus is a two-story workshop dubbed the Design Realization Garage, an homage to the many Silicon Valley companies that started in garages and to the industrial space that d.tech occupied from 2015 through 2017. There, students collaborate on projects with each other as well as their instructors and even Oracle employees who are available to mentor them and their work.

Its emphasis on technology notwithstanding, the d.tech’s look was influenced — literally — from the ground up. “The shape and location of the site — a long, slender parcel of land running along the shore of the Belmont Channel with the iconic Oracle towers in the background — were significant design considerations,” said Colleen Cassity, executive director, Oracle Education Foundation and Oracle Corporate Citizenship.

The school’s culture was also a factor that informed its design. “The culture of d.tech — a school that is constantly evolving and iterating on its model, and that encourages its students to try things, make things and put their knowledge into action — was another major consideration,” said Cassity. “The building’s aesthetic is deeply informed by both sets of considerations. It’s a long, sinuous building that curves to follow the shape of the shoreline. It is harmonious with the look and feel of Oracle’s iconic glass buildings, yet distinct, with some earth-toned exterior materials, surrounded by green spaces planted with native species and the natural beauty of the Belmont Channel, the western shore of San Francisco Bay separating Redwood Shores and Foster City.”

Milpitas, Calif.-based XL Construction constructed the new facility, while Redwood City, Calif.-based DES Architects + Engineers was selected to bring the project to life as the results of a design challenge, recalled Cassity. “We presented each of our four finalist architectural firms with a parcel map and a set of 24 users, namely d.tech students and staff, for whom to design a facility in 45 minutes,” she said. “That was the design challenge, and DES Architects + Engineers rose to it quite naturally. They demonstrated genuine empathy with their users, as well as great creativity, and emerged as the clear choice.”

Throughout the subsequent design process, DES worked closely with the d.tech staff, students and their parents. The Oracle Real Estate & Facilities and the Oracle Education Foundation engaged in intensive design charrettes and spent two years of planning and permitting thereafter. The result is a building that exemplifies user-centered design. To bring it full circle, the founding class who helped in the design process beginning in 2014 will graduate in June 2018.

To read the entire article, check out the March/April issue of School Construction News.

The post Oracle Helps See the Future of High School Design at d.tech appeared first on School Construction News.

QUEENS, N.Y. — Sometimes schools teach algebra; sometimes their names sound like algebra. Such is the case for P.S. 144Q, otherwise known in Queens as Public School 144 Colonel Jeromus Remsen School, which is doing a little math of its own — namely addition.

A December groundbreaking ceremony marked the beginning of a large-scale addition to the elementary school to accommodate a student body expected to grow from 894 students to nearly 1,600 in the coming years.

The ambitious, $52.4 million, four-story addition will house 26 new classrooms, an entrance lobby, an outdoor play area, a cafeteria, offices and a medical suite. Designed in accordance with the NYC Green Schools Guide and Rating System by New York-based Urbahn Architects,  the addition will put a premium on energy efficiency and a healthy environment, whilst preserving the original building’s early 20th century aesthetic.

“In addition to accommodating the school’s functional and programmatic needs, Urbahn’s architectural team has focused on ensuring that the design of the new building respects both the look of the existing school and the scale of the surrounding single-family home residential neighborhood,” said Urbahn Designer and Principal Martin D. Stein, AIA, in a statement.

Stein also added that the original building, which was erected in 1931, will be matched by incorporating a two-story brick portion into one of its facades in an effort to visually reduce the perceived scale of the addition. “It features a contrasting brick color to draw attention to the smaller scale of the lower portion,” he added.

Besides the new student and faculty spaces, the addition includes improvements to the current facility that will see the replacement of door knobs with ADA-compliant door latches, relocations and renovations to its bathrooms, an upgraded exercise room, a guidance suite, auditorium and four classrooms. An inclined chair lift will be installed to provide access to the lower area of the third floor of the existing structure. Likewise, the school will obtain ADA-compliant water fountains featuring bottle-filling stations.

Of note is the entrance lobby, which will be 16-feet high and boast a large glass-and-metal storefront, complemented by a broad stairwell that will lead down to the student dining room level. Don’t want to take the stairs? No worries, the ADA-compliant upgrades realized in the entrance and lobby will also benefit from the installation of two elevators.

“The new building will accommodate 590 students and address functional deficiencies of the existing school,” Stein said in a statement. “The expansion will also eliminate the need for the currently used temporary modular, outdoor classroom facilities. The project was designed to address the school’s needs in the most cost-effective manner and to minimize the extent of renovations to the existing building, which will continue to operate during construction.”

The cellar of the new building will house both a kitchen and a dining room, the latter of which will be treated with acoustic fixtures on the ceiling and walls that will dampen noise within the space. And to allay any sense of being underground, the cafeteria’s ceiling will be fitted with a simulated skylight that uses daylight-hued LED lighting fixtures. Moreover, the ceiling will be treated as floating islands to create visual divisions to help foster the sense of discrete locations within the otherwise open space.

An all-new principal’s office and general offices will be located on the first floor. The first and second floors will house Pre-K and kindergarten classes as well as a newly designed, dedicated ECC playground. The third and fourth floors will provide classrooms for second and fourth graders as well as several resource rooms.

To read the entire article, check out the January/February issue of School Construction News.

The post Adding Up: NY Elementary School Breaks Ground on Ambitious Project appeared first on School Construction News.

CARSON, Calif. — As subtle as it may be, there’s a profound difference between A. Quincy Jones and the Quincy Jones. Though both made their names producing creative work in ’60s-era Los Angeles, the latter is a music producer who worked with the likes of Michael Jackson, and the former is an architect known for, among other ventures, the original design of California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). One of these talented fellows recently had a “fab lab” integrated into their oeuvre, and here’s a hint — it’s not going to win a Grammy.

The new Toyota Center Fab Lab at CSUDH, however, might still win awards despite being theoretically undanceable. Thanks to the efforts of the Los Angeles office of HGA Architects and Engineers (HGA), a new three-story, 91,000-square-foot on-campus Science and Innovation building broke ground in September 2017.

The $82 million facility comprises CSUDH’s physics, biology and chemistry programs as well as  a third-floor roof terrace and a first-floor makerspace fabrication laboratory (aka “Fab Lab”) made possible by a $4 million gift from the Toyota USA Foundation.

“A facility of this quality and potential will significantly elevate our university’s standing as a comprehensive and inclusive teaching and research institution, while our faculty, students, and the teachers and young learners in our partner schools reap the benefits of all it has to offer,” said CSUDH President Willie J. Hagan in a statement.

Moreover, the impact of the facility is intended to radiate beyond the confines of the campus and bring the spirit of innovation into the surrounding community of Carson, Calif., a suburb in Los Angeles County about 13 miles from Los Angeles’ downtown. Carson is where gansta rap pioneer Dr. Dre spent his middle school years and a See’s Candy factory is among the top employers. The coming Toyota Center for Innovation in STEM Education, as it will be known, could also become a wellspring of new opportunities for the community-at-large.

“One of HGA’s primary objectives for this project was to design a facility maximized to the best use for its wide variety of users. In this case, not only did we design a facility, which will fully serve the departments it will soon house, but we also created a space that will enhance the learning process in STEM education by serving local K-12 teachers to further their expertise and training, in addition to being available to the broader community,” said James Matson, vice president at HGA.

The college concurs. As President Hagan said, “With Toyota’s generous gift, and HGA’s beautiful and highly-functional design, this ultra-modern instructional and research facility will pay dividends to our local communities and industries for generations to come.”

The project was not without its challenges, however. Among them was fitting the footprint of the Science and Innovation building into an awkwardly long, narrow site. To fit the building into the available space whilst creating the types of spaces necessary to promote collaboration amongst students, a skewed level design was implemented wherein the second floor and terrace rest at a slight angle on the first floor. There was also the existing campus aesthetic established by A. Quincy Jones in which the new facility needed to integrate. Jones was a beloved figure on campus, where he remained Master Architect up to his death in 1979. The university was established in the wake of the Watts Riots by Gov. Pat Brown, who “decided that a university was needed that catered to the poor, disaffected minorities in those communities,” wrote architecture photographer Darren Bradley on his blog Modernist Architecture.

But the project almost didn’t happen when, in 1966, Governor-Elect Ronald Reagan froze funding for state colleges. “The school was saved by a last-minute budget compromise in the legislature, and construction began in earnest on the new Dominguez Hills location,” wrote Bradley.

To honor Jones’ legacy, the team, led by Satoshi Teshima, associate vice president and senior designer at HGA, found an innovative way to integrate the new with the old and strike balance between the two.

“The new Science and Innovation building is placed directly adjacent to the existing Natural Sciences and Mathematics Building, which is to be renovated in the next construction phase to create a highly prominent science hub and presence in the very heart of the CSUDH campus. This strengthens the current masterplan, which is closely tied to the historic outline of Quincy Jones’ original campus plan, in which clear academic and administrative zones along major pedestrian spines are established,” said Teshima. “The new Science and Innovation building not only emphasizes the overall campus organization and improves wayfinding, but it also creates a gateway, in conjunction with the library expansion, along the main North-South axis as the two tallest buildings on campus.”

To read the entire article, check out the November/December issue of School Construction News.

The post Cal State Dominguez Hills Honors the Old with New Fab Lab appeared first on School Construction News.

COLLIN COUNTY, Texas — McKinney Independent School District (ISD) knows its numbers. The Collin County district has 24,500 students in 20 elementary schools, five middle schools, three high schools, two alternative campuses and one early childhood education center. Accounting for administration and support, the district maintains 68 facilities covering more than 4 million square feet on 603 acres of grounds.

Given the finesse with which it deploys digits, it’s no wonder that acquiring $69.9 million for a new high school stadium seemed achievable. It is considered among the most expensive such facilities in the country, competing with Katy ISD’s recently opened Legacy Stadium. This is Texas after all, and bigger is better, hence the new stadium, which will consist of 12,000 seats, 2,000 parking spaces and a community events center. It’s a big project that’s not been without a few speed bumps (namely a $7.1 budget bump up from its original $62.8 million, as reported by the Dallas News), but none that have proven insurmountable.

The district broke ground at a ceremony in December 2016 with school officials, local politicians and at least one big cat mascot present (McKinney High School is “Home of the Lions”). Besides raising the bar for high school stadiums, the district also had to raise the money for such a large financial expenditure — let alone justify it to voters. For stakeholders, the political will aligned with the sweeping changes already occurring in Collin County.

“McKinney has been growing by leaps and bounds, and because of this, we have had to add additional buildings to the district,” said David Spann, McKinney ISD’s chief information officer. “Since 2011, we have added 30 school buildings.”

Spann pointed to a bond election that occurred that year, which the district had originally thought would support the construction of the new stadium. Instead, it ended up going into building new schools. In 2016, the district pursued a subsequent bond election that netted $220 million, a portion of which is being used for the new stadium, which is being constructed by Naples, Fla.-based Manhattan Construction. McKinney’s well-funded school system is unusual in Texas, whose schools, according to U.S. News & World Report, presently rank at No. 41 in the country.

“We have a ceiling of 50 cents for bond debt, and our CFO has a very aggressive payback plan,” said Spann of CFO James Bird, who joined the district in December 2015.  “His goal is to continue to reduce the tax rate while maintaining quality facilities for our community. He is so aggressive that we were able to reduce our tax rate by 5 cents. Also, we do 20-year bonds, which is more aggressive than most school systems.”

The McKinney ISD 2016 Bond passed in May 2016, with 62 percent of voters supporting the measure. Naturally, the district knew exactly how many voters to thank: 11,114.

“We are also lucky in that with our incredible growth as a community, property values have gone up as well, which helps us with debt pay down. To help justify the expense, we have designed and built a stadium made of concrete that will be here 75 years from now,” said Spann. “[It] will last indefinitely. The stadium has 12,000 seats, and because we have multiple high schools in the district that will be playing each other in this stadium, both sides of the stadium (the home and away sides) are identical. That way fans will have the same experience whether they are the home or away team.”

The local Booster Club will run an on-site “spirit store,” and the concessions stand will have upgraded credit card technology. There will also be a press box with TVs present as well as guest rooms with displays.

“We can pull images off of the video board and send those images to the displays,” said Spann. “We will also have big monitors in the locker rooms and offices and conference rooms throughout the building.”

Its size notwithstanding, there are many factors that differentiate the stadium project from those at other high schools. For starters, near one of the end zones, there will be an 8,000-square-foot community events center. The space will seat 500 people at banquet rounds or 700 to 800 if it is set up in a classroom configuration. It also will boast floating walls, so it can be divided into three separate rooms. It will also have a wall of glass overlooking the stadium.

To read the entire article, check out the September/October issue of School Construction News. 

The post For New Texas High School Stadium, It’s Go Big or Go Home appeared first on School Construction News.