York Region School for Athletics and Healthy Active Living

Narratives

Architect Narrative

Located in Markham, a suburb of Toronto, the school is a visionary undertaking. Its guiding force in program, design process, and form has been the creation of a setting in which its 1800 students can learn about and embrace healthy, active living as part of a larger community. Too often secondary schools are marked by rigid separations of athletics, academics, and civics, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area, where secondary schools usually have relatively small student bodies and are thus specialized in particular domains. The conception and execution of the the school has been guided by a unanimous desire on the part of the District School Board, advisory groups, and key community stakeholders to create synergies among these three domains. It is envisioned as a center of excellence for learning about how healthy living includes connecting with one’s community and the environment, as well as striving for personal fitness, academic excellence, and general well-being.

At multiple scales, the school embodies the concept of design for learning. The four-storey facility is structured on two axes intersecting in a community forum where academic, athletic, and civic life come together. This is an excellent example of leading edge work done in environmental psychology, capitalizing on how people make sense of their surroundings by constructing mental maps, in which clearly-organized paths play a principal role. An east-west axis–the ‘Athlete’s Street’–is a double-height space linking several major activity areas with specialized athletic facilities. Not merely a corridor, this axis doubles as viewing gallery for active and passive engagement, both of which are demonstrably important for positive learning environments. This exemplifies the School’s embodiment of transparency as a design principle. The north-south ‘academic’ axis links the Athlete’s Street with classrooms, laboratory spaces, and studios for visual arts, music, and theater, all anchored on the top floor by the library and computer labs. The two axes materialize through indoor-outdoor transition zones into outdoor sports facilities (including game fields, an eight-lane 400m running track, and basketball courts) and less-formally programmed public spaces linking the School into its neighborhood and landscape context.

In process, the mandate was to develop a design that supports the needs of the local community and the regional municipality of which it is part without compromising the activities of either. The project represents a tremendous opportunity in the design of learning environments in a rapidly-growing metropolitan region of five million; across North America, very few precedents exist at the secondary school level in which an academic school curriculum is so closely intertwined with the athletics program. Consequently, the planning and design of this complex was deeply influenced by three Advisory Committees of external experts (former Olympians, elite amateur athletes, senior staff from local University Physical Education faculties, sports administrators, and curriculum experts) as well as interest groups from the broader public. A strong desire that became apparent in the design process was the need to combine a center of excellence for athletics with public space where athletics, academics, community life, and social activities casually converge. Our collaborative approach successfully engaged the expertise of the key stakeholders through workshops, charettes and public meetings to develop these ideas into a School that can serve as a symbolic and functional hub for healthy living.

Educator Narrative

The York Region School for Athletics and Healthy Active Living brings to life the project mandate to create an educational environment in which the student’s learning potential and future success is enhanced by developing and supporting a healthy active lifestyle. Three aspects are striking:

1. The School supports the diverse ways in which learning occurs. The main forum, where ‘academic’ and ‘athletic’ axes meet, is also where community events, chance encounters, casual eating, and other synergy-building moments are made focal points of the educational experience. Building on lessons learned in other successful shared-use facilities designed by ZAS, flexible space has been balanced with dedicated instructional areas (i.e., kinesiology, broadcasting, high-performance athletic training facilities, and sports administration). Much of the balance lies in making visible the activities of the learning environment; transparency is crucial, literally and in figurative terms, and thus the ‘Athlete’s Street’ of interconnected floor spaces exists on all building levels to maximizes visibility, accessibility, and integration among program areas. Intimate and identifiable groupings for formal education in other areas of the secondary school curriculum are established while avoiding their segregation into ‘pods’ that stymie social cohesion.

2. Extending the principles of transparency beyond the building envelope, the School takes advantages of linkages with its adjoining river valley and linear landscape park system. Students are provided with a learning context that is more than picturesque—it is a ‘living laboratory’ of natural process and landscape restoration. Putting into practice other key tenets of ecological design, the vertical stacking of athletic facilities also minimizes the building’s footprint; the School will be serviced by a District Energy utility, and a LEED Silver rating has been targeted for its construction. Careful siting of the building ensures that favorable microclimates are created to make focal points for school life, while the indoor-outdoor transition strategically deals with the long, cold, and windy winter months.

3. A vital lesson that has been learned in the design of educational facilities is ensuring that the student body is given meaningful opportunities to connect with communities beyond that of the school. In this respect, the School links on its southeast flank with a long-established village center at the core of a burgeoning suburban district. Obvious elements include its welcoming entry and the library space, which acts as ‘lighthouse’ rather than a fortress—a gateway for the community, which has access to various multi-purpose rooms near the School forum (e.g. auditorium, meeting rooms). In subtler yet practical ways, the School is linked into its surroundings through the application of good planning and urban design principles. A nearby commuter rail station make the School easily accessible to students from across the metropolitan region, while also embodying important urban design lessons related to enhancing the viability of urban areas by reducing car dependence. In weaving the School into the urban fabric (now being reurbanized and intensified into a medium- to high-density mixed-use neighborhood), the design also fulfils the School’s mandate to recognize that healthy living is not just about excellence in athletics but also—perhaps more importantly—about making ‘passive’ exercise part of one’s everyday routine, e.g., by walking or cycling to work and school.

In short, the School provides students with everyday opportunities to practice being a good citizen as well as striving for excellence in athletics and academics, and to embrace learning as an all-encompassing, lifelong endeavor.