Eagle County residents and district personnel dreamed of creating an exceptional new high school to inculcate pride and progress in their youth, using the extraordinary beauty of the nature and outdoors of their community to influence the design. H+L led the Design Advisory - a cross-representative group consisting of school board members, school district administration, school management, faculty and staff, students and parents and community members to develop this vision and dream for their new school.

The planning and design of this new high school discovered the balance between using mother nature’s mountain-like design as an influence while creating a state-of-the-art educational facility within a defined budget. Unlike the old facility, the new school has a series of cascading buildings designed to fit into the hillside. Organized into three “villages”, the facility is scaled in the spirit of mountain communities built along narrow valleys in an ever-changing terrain. A curved circulation “river” weaves past each village, tying the entire facility into one community.

The educational concepts focused on transforming the way the community had previously looked at education. The building’s academic village layout facilitates the ability to easily accommodate changing educational models over the coming years. The teaching area layout, surrounding a central open-air courtyard, can easily integrate an academy approach, and the central courtyard is an element that brings students and faculty together in the outdoors at the heart of the school for instruction as well as bringing natural light to the interiors and connecting to nature in the outdoors. The school was planned and designed to be shared with the community for functions in the auditorium, athletic facilities and includes specialty teaching areas such as an industrial culinary kitchen, visual arts, state-of-the art wood shop, science greenhouse, and high-tech video production and photography dark room.