The new 27,800 square foot ground-up building
champions
the school's mission and culture of learning and social awareness
through
spaces suffused with natural light, promoting calm, creativity, and
collective
responsibility. The entry lobby, cafeteria, and multi-purpose gymnasium
on the
lower floors, used for daily school-wide gatherings and public special
events,
are all linked by light-filled stairs and gentle ramps. On the façade,
translucent, acid-etched glass provides a hint of the daily activity of
students and teachers to the neighborhood as they come and go.
Classrooms
reside on the more private upper floors, screened by a fabric-like weave
of
staggered windows and panels of varying colors and degrees of
reflectivity. On
the interior, this
composition in turn creates an organized system of tack boards for
instructional materials and other displays. The school had
an
extremely tight budget, caused both by the high cost of construction
that
plagues inner-city schools and the fact that its site was within the
100-year
flood zone. Our office acted as both architect and
construction
manager in an integrated process led by the architects. We provided a Guaranteed Maximum Price at
$9.875 million and came in under budget with over $520,000 in savings,
which
was returned to the school for their endowment. This
process
provided a level of intensive quality control and substantial cost
savings, resulting
in a building that would otherwise have been out of reach for such a
school.Peter Gluck and Partners ArchitectsShannon
Bambenek
Kees
Brinkman
Kathy
Chang
Steven
Chen
A.B.
Moburg-Davis
Marc
Gee, Construction Manager
Peter L. GluckBethia
Liu
Jill
Reinecke
Elaine
Sun
Stacie
Wong, Project Architect
ARCS Construction ServicesMarc
Gee, Construction Manager
Stacie
Wong, Project Architect
A.B.
Moburg-Davis
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