Vanden High School

Narratives

Campus of Learning Environments

The additions and modernizations to this high school reorganize the campus to accommodate an increase of enrollment from 800 to 1400 students. This increase has already largely occurred and has led to overcrowded conditions and chaotic placement of temporary portable classrooms. The school community remembers the relative smallness of the original campus with affection and would like to recreate its personal scale and orderly environment while creating new flexible classroom and workspace configurations. New classrooms are designed in flexible buildings housing six classrooms each and presenting different faces on each orientation both to optimize daylighting and to create variety on the campus when they are repeated. The design of the buildings creates learning communities within the total campus, flexible classroom groups within the learning communities, and a variety of flexible classrooms, offices, alcoves, and nooks within the buildings that house a hierarchy of activities from large group to individual learning. By defining courtyards of differing character with the new classroom buildings, art studios, and music rehearsal spaces, learning communities in the arts and in technology have a physical area of the campus to call their own.

Each six-classroom building also includes a teacher workroom and a shared multipurpose space that can be used as either student or teacher workspace. The school makes very efficient use of classroom space, filling each of them for virtually every teaching period, and making necessary provision of teacher preparation space outside the classrooms. In existing double loaded corridor buildings the modernization makes new doors into classrooms from the outside and converts corridor space to teacher prep space. This not only gives individual teachers a place to work but also encourages teamwork on the part of the teaching staff. The buildings use high performance HVAC and lighting systems to deliver a calculated 35% improvement over California’s already stringent energy requirements. Low slope roofs provide deep overhangs over entrances, and south windows. HVAC units mounted on vertical walls avoid penetrations through the roof.

Flexible facilties

The design of these high school buildings focuses around flexibility. Each area offers students, staff, and community tremendous flexibility as we look to the next 5, 10, or 15 years.

The primary goal of this project was to use growth funds to add additional classrooms in such a layout that would provide for small learning communities as the campus grows. Through creative planning, a highly congested campus will be more spread out providing more space for the students and larger quads where students will feel more comfortable and less cramped.

The primary building design includes six classrooms and a central work area. The central work area will be flexible so that it can be used as a teacher work area or student work area. Each building also has small area for teacher offices so that the teachers have a “home” as our teachers have to move from classroom to classroom throughout the day.

With the new music room, the design allows for future growth of a performing arts center that, when complete, creates one very useful educational setting.