The New Harry S. Truman High School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

Overview
The new high school program called for two semi-independent schools of 102 students housed within a single facility of 23,000sf. The curriculum is based on the “small schools” concept focusing on integrating subjects with career internships and community service opportunities while offering experiential activities to enhance learning. All students are connected with a single staff member through an advisory program and are mentored in small groups of 17 students. Each school consists of 6 advisories in an open learning environment, commons, project room, computer work areas, and private study rooms.

The building design attempted to respond to the new educational program and address building, environmental, image and educational needs with a new facility. The design is the result of an interactive process of review and analysis, which explored how to design a facility that enhances the mission of the school today and into the future.

In particular, the design process addressed the following five principle ideas:
· Create a “community hub” by bringing together multiple partners on one site.
· Provide an adaptable building shell that can accommodate changing teaching methodologies
· Create a learning environment that reflects an innovative new teaching model
· Provide an abundance of natural daylight in all learning areas
· Design the building to impact the environment as little as possible

Site Plan
The proposed master plan includes the new high school, a youth development center, a childcare facility, and a city park on an adjacent parcel. The three site partners each have an important community role, while also offering complementary services to each other. By bringing these facilities together, the site provides a significant focal point for the greater community.
The proposed site design attempts to respond to the individual requirements of the partner facilities; the relationship of the facilities to the surrounding site features; and the relationship of the partners to each other as a cohesive campus. The plan seeks to optimize the available land by the orientation and location of the new facilities. The three buildings are arranged along the northern perimeter of the property. This provided an opportunity to maximize the solar exposure to both the buildings and open public spaces. In addition, the three facilities are able to take advantage of their proximity to the park. A pedestrian path connects the three facilities and converges on a central public open space adjacent to the entries of the high school and the youth development center.

Building Adaptability
The facility illustrates a method of creating a low-cost flexible building shell that can accommodate multiple teaching programs. The design process analyzed the basic relationship between a static envelope and an evolving program by exploring the possibilities of building a container capable of relatively easy transformations required by different user groups and educational models. Three teaching models - traditional, small schools, and project based learning - were used as foils to test the building containers but did not exclude other potential future models.

Small School Model
The “small schools” teaching model developed by the principal and teachers of the school required two small independent schools to be accommodated in one building structure. While each school has their own learning spaces, housed within the east and west wings of the building, the two schools share common support facilities, including administration, food service, a student store, mechanical and electrical rooms.
The primary teaching spaces within each school are grouped in a single “open learning environment.” Within this area different group sizes are accommodated by three area types of varying size and varying degrees of acoustical and visual privacy — small study rooms for groups up to 6 people; advisory areas for learning teams up to 18 people; and a large central gathering area for a school assembly of 102 students.
The 6 advisories are situated a radial arrangement from the central gathering area reinforcing the emphasis on the school community. The acoustics have been addressed by varying the volumes of the spaces while utilizing sound absorbing panels applied to the roof deck and the partition walls. “Masking” noise has been introduced through controlled adjustment of the mechanical equipment. Finally, the commons and project rooms provide areas for larger groups to participate in separate activities not conducive to the open area.

Daylighting
A goal of the design is to maximize the use of natural daylighting. A recent study by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for the California Board of Energy Efficiency, Daylighting in Schools, empirically showed an increase in test scores of as much as 26% in reading and 20% in math of students in classrooms with good quality daylighting.
This project was faced with the challenge of making daylighting work in a number of classroom configurations, previously described. Windows placed on the perimeter would not have effectively lit all proposed teaching spaces, consequently a raised central clerestory scheme was developed which accommodates all classroom configurations. For the traditional classroom, light is introduced on two sides of the room, from the exterior wall and from a clerestory band. A similar situation works for the project based learning model with its smaller classrooms. For the small schools model, where learning spaces could occur anywhere in the footprint of the building, the clerestory lighting scheme provides good diffuse daylight throughout the building.

Sustainability
The design explored ways to create a healthy and sustainable environment for the new high school. Beyond the benefit to learning, natural daylighting has been used to achieve energy efficiency reducing the overall lighting energy use to 33% below code requirement