2014 Top Magnet High School - Magnet Schools of America
This Magnet High School for Technology and Design is on a park-like college campus, near its entrance. Program spaces include instruction and student collaboration around digital media, physics, optics, production studios, virtual reality studios, robotics lab, nanotechnology, library, social spaces, faculty offices, support space. The architecture had to appeal to students totally jazzed by digital technology and design, providing a vibrant visual environment. Bright colors, natural light, sleek surfaces, angled walls, and vistas into and through the building communicate a sense of digital hipness, movement, and excitement. Collaboration and group flexibility is key to the work of these 400 students, so classrooms/labs arrayed around the day-lighted atrium are open and visually connected, encouraging serendipitous exchanges between students and faculty. The architects worked closely with Magnet High School students to understand what kind of technology turns them on, gets them excited, how it functions, what it looks like. Vibrant colors--green, purple, yellow, and orange--are popular in many of the computer devices and technology the students use, so the architecture echoes those hues (a total of 8 accent colors were used). Contrasting pixels are abstracted as exterior decorative motifs to help make the 81,000-square-foot school a landmark.
Construction type, materials, mechanical systems, technical data:
Steel-frame construction with metal-stud backup. Exterior high-pressure rain-screen panels composed of Kraft paper with phenolic resin for exterior cladding, decorative facades, and interior surfaces. The design makes maximum use of natural light and outdoor views with high-performance insulated glazing and light shelves, cutting energy consumption and providing visual relief from computer screens. Solar louvers mitigate sun penetration. Other sustainable features include: high-albedo roof material to reduce heat gain; high-performance wall/roof insulation (R-value 24/30); an array of high-efficiency MEP systems.
The design meets LEED Silver Certification.
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