Centennial High School established a new benchmark for schools with this new 2,400 student high school constructed on a 75-acre site in Las Cruces, a rapidly growing city in New Mexico’s southern Rio Grande Valley. The campus-style, 370,000sf facility is housed in seven separate structures, requiring four major levels to accommodate the site’s 80-foot vertical drop. The potentially overwhelming scale of the school was transformed into a welcoming, non-intimidating environment with a site solution that nestles buildings and creates protected outdoor spaces within the natural topography. With plazas and courtyards that take advantage of the favorable year-round climate, the buildings are organized to form an outdoor pedestrian concourse diagonally bisecting the site to provide views of the striking Organ Mountains to the east, and the lush Rio Grande Valley to the west. The concourse provides a continuous pathway from the active playfields on the lower western end to the quiet classroom clusters at the higher, eastern end of the site. Separate, distinct campus entries from designated parking areas are provided for students, faculty, and visitors to enhance security, safety, traffic management, and way-finding.
With the landscape providing a strong sense of place, the building architecture is expressed by simple, white stucco masses with a contrasting corrugated gray metal skin to connect them and express vertical circulation and mechanical services. Bright accent colors applied to soffits for protection from the fading rays of the sun are located at building entries to enhance way-finding and provide visual interest. Outdoor “rooms” are created at key locations, protected from sun and wind, to visually connect and extend useable space to the outdoors.
The design successfully creates a strong sense of place in a unique New Mexico setting with spatial variety and visual simplicity to promote positive social interaction and safety for students and faculty.
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