Park Orchard Elementary School is a new 46,851 square-foot building on a 10.6-acre site within a currently developing residential neighborhood. It is located adjacent to a City park, so was planned in cooperation with the City of Moses Lake in order to share outdoor recreational facilities and parking between the two organizations in order to cost effectively maximize benefits to the community. Another partner in this development is the Boys and Girls Club of the Columbia Basin, for whom we also designed a 10,176 square-foot facility on the school site further enhancing opportunities for community access to services and enabling the school district and Boys and Girls Club to share resources.The new school utilized the previous Sage Point Elementary design as a prototype in order to conserve design funds for the school district. As such, NAC|Architecture was intimately involved in site selection to ensure that the existing building design would fit properly on the selected site with regard to such criteria as entry visibility, position of playfields relative to access points from the building, parking and bus lane configuration, availability of utilities, and optimal north and south orientation of classroom windows for daylighting. The design process involved comprehensive interviews of staff at Sage Point, and then applying the lessons learned in order to make improvements. It also involved relocating a few spaces, such as the computer lab and special education classrooms, within the set footprint in order to enhance accessibility of these spaces for use by the Boys and Girls Club.To provide a unique identity for the new Park Orchard Elementary community a new design theme was developed that borrowed imagery and patterning from the juxtaposition of the amoebic-shaped Moses Lake and its rocky outcropping shoreline in the context of the man-made pattern of crop-circle fields. The exterior expression of masonry was revised to reflect this new theme as was the color palette of both interior and exterior finishes. The patchwork pattern of the fields was used to create accent patterns in features like the main entry concrete pathways and outdoor classrooms within the courtyard, as well as in routed joints at durable MDF wainscot paneling in the corridors. The rocky outcroppings are interpreted into concrete seat walls at outdoor bus and student pick-up waiting areas and as colorful accent soffit elements in a few key areas such as the library and multi-purpose room.
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