Todd Beamer High School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

“The building is not the change. The building allows the change.”

This statement was adopted as the guiding principle shaping the design of this high school. Currently, this facility enhances student learning through the implementation of three distinct academies, all sharing the library, Commons, fitness and arts resources of a large public school, and community learning through general access to the fitness and performing arts facilities. The guiding principle recognizes that this educational model will change, and the building is designed to allow significant changes in pedagogy with minimal impact to building systems.

The School Board approved a construction budget of $29 million to “provide a comprehensive high school to accommodate 1,300 students.” Recognizing that an intimate and delightful environment coupled with a small school strategy would lead to more engaged and successful students, the building design team focused on providing a highly adaptable facility with strong connections to its natural surroundings, places for impromptu gathering to reinforce informal learning, and surprising details that introduce unique character to building areas.

PLANNING PROCESS INNOVATION

The design team directed its efforts to ensure the new school would flexibly serve multiple educational approaches. A small school planning team, made up of the facilities director, district educators, students and community leaders guided the architects in developing a series of use scenarios. These scenarios explored multiple teaching and learning styles rather than developing specific space requirements; resulting in a “performance program” rather than the traditional educational specification.

FLEXIBLE DESIGN

The design of the building relies on providing appropriate structure and distributed infrastructure to support the performance program. The building is organized as a series of arms reaching out into the landscape. Each arm can operate independently from the center spine that houses the main resource rooms and a zone of smaller support spaces. Water, gas, electricity and communication systems travel to all arms of the building, allowing relatively easy re-configuration of the floor plan. Fresh air, daylight and access to views into the landscape are available from all learning spaces. Colored glass and surfaces provide delightful surprises throughout. Because input from the new school’s educators needed to be incorporated into the design after the start of construction, bid documents were organized to fix unit costs for non-structural and non-infrastructure components. When the school administration chose to open the school as three semi-autonomous academies, the building was easily adapted to accommodate the educational approach within budget and without compromising the opening schedule.

MULTI-USE INVESTMENTS

The school is designed to maximize the utilization of program areas afforded by the construction budget. The Student Commons is designed to accommodate a variety of uses including cafeteria, musical performance, large lectures, dances, gymnastic practice and student exhibitions. This range of use is possible because of adjustable acoustical, electrical, lighting and furniture systems, as well as appropriately accessible storage and adjacency to lobby spaces. Creation of environmental study areas on the school property provide outdoor learning opportunities while allowing drainage systems to protect sensitive wetland areas.

Educator Narrative

DYNAMIC DESIGN PROCESS YIELDS EXCITING RESULTS

From 1985-1995, our school district built or remodeled all but five of thirty-five schools. Yet time and again, they were obsolete upon opening, given few feedback loops, little future thinking, and no dynamic process for change. Knowing that the building would not “be the change,” we wanted our process and product to “allow the change” and foster more collaborative and personalized teaching and learning.

Agreeing that to design for one outcome would be inadequate, we embarked on a fast-paced, inclusive process. Making a pact to push one another to higher levels of thinking, we decided against writing extensive educational specifications that might encourage a more singular approach, and focused instead on guiding principles based on beliefs about our students, community, and how people learn.

A key question became, “What meaningful groupings of spaces do we need to support collaboration and maximize learning?”

Through scenario-planning exercises we asked whether the spaces we envisioned could solve all the educational outcomes we could imagine. Designing scheme after scheme, we brought them before focus groups of students, community and educators, creating rich feedback loops and building the capacity in all players to conceive new ways of thinking about education, learning and the place we call school.

Organized as a village model, the campus reinforces small groupings of students and staff. Laid out to encourage discovery, the plan is asymmetrically shaped around a commons and adjacent plaza that are oriented to the fields, forest and stream beyond to encourage exploration of the natural environment. Classroom clusters are grouped in radiating wings around a main street in a fashion that maximizes natural lighting.

Opting to include a variety of small learning communities within the larger campus (the school opened as three academies, but can easily convert to support four, six or even eight small schools) we studied educational clusters to see how they could be converted to house multiple program models — and in so doing, learned valuable lessons about structural supports, building loads and flexibility as a traditional departmental model was studied alongside independent learning, schools-within-schools, integrated curriculum, project-based programs and self-contained academies. Wanting to maximize the ability to support a variety of groupings, even the plaza was studied in support of informal gathering.

The result is that niches and nooks are infused throughout, both along main circulation paths, as well as within the cluster areas. Teacher learning studios (replete with individual workstations, tables for collaboration, copy machines, and small kitchens) are adjacent to niches in the clusters where students hang out in an environment of flexible furnishings and white boards for exhibition. Technology is everywhere, as are venues for real-world and project-based learning. The effect is a safe and supportive environment that encourages connections indoors, and outdoors, and on to good works in the community and the world.

Our building’s signature is the fluidity with which it responds to change. In fact, it doesn’t just respond to change — it encourages it, promotes it, makes it our friend.