Sites Unseen in Education Design (with Related Video)
Aug 1, 2011 12:00 PM, By Peter Gisolfi
The best academic buildings relate clearly to their settings.
The view from Reid Castle on the Manhattanville College campus in Purchase, N.Y., shows the Berman Student Center. The center, together with an adjacent residence hall and dining hall, creates a new quadrangle.
The conventional wisdom in the United States assumes that colleges and universities exist on campuses, whereas most other schools are standalone buildings. Of course, exceptions exist, notably, independent schools on suburban and rural campuses. But most urban independent schools and most public schools, from preschool to grade 12, are buildings. When a school needs to expand, perhaps to add 10 classrooms, an architect is hired, and a new wing or small addition might be added to the mass of the existing building. Unfortunately, institutions that follow this procedure are missing important opportunities.
In terms of architectural traditions, the formal function of most so-called "building" schools is as objects in space—that is, a solid building mass surrounded by an open area. In some settings, the building itself might act as the edge of an adjacent street. A campus tradition emphasizes groupings of buildings that define outdoor spaces, such as quadrangles. In this tradition, the building design has a responsibility to enclose indoor space and simultaneously define the edge of adjacent outdoor space.
Recently, the word "sustainability" has become popular. Sustainability refers to designs that take maximum advantage of natural features, such as climate and topography, to increase the adaptability and energy efficiency of a building; simultaneously, a sustainable approach seeks to have the least negative impact on the environment.
Whether an academic building is part of a campus or is simply a single building on a site, it can be situated to define outdoor space and to relate intelligently to the manmade and natural environments. For instance:
•Academic buildings often are used as the defining edges of academic quadrangles.
•Academic buildings not part of a campus still can relate clearly to the patterns of surrounding development. For example, a school building could employ the same setbacks and building heights as its neighbors. A school building might be situated to define the edge of a town green or park.
•Academic buildings can be situated to relate to natural features, such as the slope of a site, views and local climate. In the case of climate, buildings can be situated to relate to solar orientation, as well as to prevailing breezes.
Site-specific benefits
Many schools demonstrate how understanding a site can enhance a design:
•The Pembroke Hill School is a preK-to-12 independent school that serves about 1,200 students on two campuses in Kansas City, Mo.—the Wornall Campus for preschool and lower school children, and the Ward Parkway Campus for middle school and upper school students.
The Early Childhood Building on the Wornall Campus was constructed on a site that had been a parking lot. The 12-acre campus was reconfigured to accommodate this building. In the process, vehicle parking and the entrances for automobile pickup and dropoff were reconfigured and rationalized on both the north and south edges of the site. The most important objective was creating a safe pedestrian precinct in the center of the campus for young children to play freely, without danger from automobile traffic. The Early Childhood Building plays an important role in defining two open spaces: the main entry quadrangle on the south side of the campus, and the central green, an open play area for children of all ages. Because the building is designed as a courtyard or cloister with single-loaded corridors, it also defines a protected outdoor play space for preschool children.
•Manhattanville College is an undergraduate institution serving about 1,700 students on a 90-acre campus in Purchase, N.Y. The campus was constructed in the early 1950s on the Whitlaw Reid Estate, which was owned by the family that published the New York Herald Tribune. Reid Castle, a 19th-century McKim, Mead & White confection, still serves as the central landmark building on this campus. The original campus was planned as one grandiose, elongated quadrangle focused on Reid Castle.
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
