Chicago Public School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

Background
Public schools in many urban areas have operated significantly above the desired capacity for the most effective learning for many years and has resulted in overcrowded classrooms and large schools where many students have little or no individual attention. Because of capacity problems and extensive research that indicates better performance in smaller classroom environments, large cities have begun experimenting with strategies to break down the organization of schools to achieve optimum sizes for student achievement. a trend has emerged where educators in large urban school systems have begun organizing their existing schools into several smaller schools within a single building.

Because it is politically and financially impractical to build new public schools as small as they should be, there is a need to develop a design approach that embodies small school theory. This project was based on this need and proposed organizing a new 900-student elementary school into 4 smaller schools within one building. Each school would have some independence but still share common facilities and be under the jurisdiction of a single principal. Although many examples exists where an existing building has been slightly modified to accommodate several smaller schools, this project was looking for a new architectural prototype that specifically responded to this new trend in educational theory.

Concept: Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping describes a process of growth in which a small amount of energy or input within a system triggers the evolution of a larger system - an example being the process by which a computer is able to overcome the problem of needing software to load software by having a simple program hard-wired into itself in order to initiate what could be considered a self generative process.

This project was conceived from the premise that spatial organizations can operate as a bootstrap for the generation of communities within a school providing simple spatial platforms and links that allow productive relationships to evolve over time.

Project Description
The design is based on providing sufficient autonomy to each of the 4 small schools while maximizing shared resources such as library, cafeteria, science and art areas and health services. Organizational junctures between different parts of the overall school function as bootstraps providing a structure to encourage each individual school’s self generation at multiple scales: from the student in the classroom to the community of a small school, to the larger school community housed in the entire building, and finally to the neighborhood community.

Each school has a general assembly space referred to as a generative space, which acts as a bootstrap for that school to generate its own identity and link to the school at large. The parent/teacher rooms and classrooms that bridge over the interior street link adjacent small schools, providing a shift in scale from the small to the larger school. The interior street is a bootstrap to the community as it links directly to spaces that can be used for community activities during off hours and summers while simultaneously being secured from the classrooms. The primary movement of students and teachers is facilitated by a system of 1:20 ramps that allow all students of varying abilities to access all programs. The ramps allow for a 2-story arrangement of programs that facilitate interaction between the small schools, the shared programs and the community circulation space of the interior street. The school building is compact and efficiently arranged such that travel time is minimized and the identity of the small schools remains clear. As students travel on the ramps to their classrooms they encircle the space of their school, creating and defining its atmosphere through their daily interactions.

The building is continuous with the landscape, sloping up out of the landscape towards the entry to each small school, while the grassy outdoor play areas between the schools slope down towards the interior street. The continuity is perceptually reinforced through the use of grass on the classroom roofs. The landscape of the site interweaves large soft grass areas and hard surfaces to play on with interspersed islands of resilient playground surfaces, plantings, and exploratory gardens of water, sand, and wind. The landscape also extends to the edges of the site with a zone of community gardens along the most public street to engage the neighborhood.