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Patterson Hall Renovation, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington; NAC|Architecture recently completed schematic design for the comprehensive renovation of Patterson Hall, the largest general classroom building on the campus of Eastern Washington University. When complete, Patterson Hall will house 44 classrooms, 165 faculty offices, two computer labs and a forensics lab. The project is designed to attain minimum LEED Silver certification. NAC|Architecture previously completed the pre-design study for the project, which included developing the program, site and cost analyses, master plan and policy coordination, technology demands, facility operations and maintenance requirements, and phased-construction considerations.
Gratts Primary Center and Early Education Center, Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles, California: 2008 Award of Honor - Project-in-Design, Coalition for Adequate School Housing; The Gratts Primary Center and Early Education Center is a joint-use project partnering with A Community of Friends, who provides low-income housing immediately adjacent to the school. It will be located near downtown Los Angeles, north of 5th Street between Lucas and Hartford. The project is intended as an expansion of the existing Gratts Elementary School immediately to the north. Programmed at 32,761 square feet with 1.4 acres of play area, the Primary Center provides facilities for 380 students. The Early Education Center will be a state-licensed daycare facility, designed to serve 176 pre-school and early-school-age children. The Early Education Center is programmed at 12,620 square feet and provides 13,000 square feet of outdoor play area for students. With a 40-degree slope from north to south on the 2.31-acre site, the project makes innovative use of multiple levels to create varied play spaces, including a protected play area on the roof of the parking structure for the kindergarten students. Play space is also provided atop the lunch shelter to increase the amount of area available. After-school access to the site by the local Boys & Girls Club is provided at the shared property line. This project was designed based on principles of California High Performance Schools with sustainable principles such as orientation, natural lighting, sustainable materials, and energy-efficient systems.
Snohomish High School Modernization, Snohomish School District, Snohomish, Washington; Snohomish School District - Snohomish, Washington The project pursues the transformation of the school, through the definition and emphasis of “negative space” and the incorporation of “texture”, to reveal coherence and readability out of the disorder of the existing campus. The challenge was that of an existing campus comprising 17 individual buildings constructed over 16 different building campaigns. The campus was first established in the 1930’s and is the “heart and soul” of the community. The goal of the project was to create a comprehensive master plan providing coherence and the desired educational relationships for critical functions, while maintaining respect for the historical context and community “memory” of the school. The use of brick became a clear mandate as a historical link, a memory. The approach was in two parts. First, organize the new and existing buildings around coherent exterior space, and secondly, provide identity, memory, and assist way-finding by utilizing brick architectural markers at circulation and gathering points. Negative space, connectors, and “texture” markers were abstracted and overlayed on the site plan. New buildings, on the west, were designed to work with the existing buildings, on the east, to create well defined exterior space. The result is a re-configuration of buildings into a coherent and functional whole, using the existing qualities of the campus and creating a purposeful learning environment.
Kootenai Medical Center Women's & Children's Center, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; As a continuation of the master planning process started in 2001, NAC|Architecture is designing Kootenai Medical Center’s new Women’s & Children’s Center. This addition will significantly expand the obstetric and pediatric services in a three-story, 70,000-square-foot structure, connected to the main hospital via an underground service tunnel and second-floor sky bridge. The Women’s & Children’s Center will be located on the second and third floors, with an entry lobby on the first floor. The remainder of the first floor is shelled space and will serve as future patient rooms for KMC’s dialysis and oncology units. The Women’s & Children’s Center includes 10 LDR rooms, 16 postpartum patient rooms, nine pediatric patient rooms, two C-Section ORs, an 11-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and three boarding rooms so mothers and families can remain near baby during NICU stays. The patient- and family-focused design keeps the family involved in the birthing experience and care. Elements include multiple waiting areas close to patient rooms, family-accessible nourishment rooms, large patient rooms to accommodate extended families, in-room sleeper bench with trundle bed for multiple family member night stays, bathing sinks in each LDR for families to experience baby’s first bath, and hotel amenities such as wireless Internet, flat-screen cable television, DVD players, video-game consoles and refrigerators.
Ardmore Elementary School, Bellevue School District - Bellevue, Washington: The culture that exists at Ardmore Elementary School clearly places high value on strong collaboration within each grade level and a strong sense of community throughout the school. The design carefully responds to these values by creating clusters of classrooms per grade level that open onto a shared work area. Each cluster and shared space is separate from the main hallway to reduce disruption in the clusters while maximizing the collaboration that can occur in a cluster. The library is a two-story space in the middle of the school with glass walls and large openings to the hallway – recreating a transparent center of the school to allow for connectedness and to support a strong sense of community.
Lynnwood Recreation Center, Lynnwood, Washington: NAC|Architecture led the planning process for expansion of the City of Lynnwood`s community and recreation facilities. The process included several public meetings, evaluation of potential sites, development of program and building options, and a business plan for the proposed concepts. The preferred concept involves expansion of Lynnwood’s existing Recreation Center in two phases. The first phase includes a complete renovation of the existing facility with expanded exercise/fitness space and a new leisure pool. The future phase is a major addition that includes a gymnasium, MAC (multipurpose activity court), elevated walking/jogging track, additional exercise/fitness space, senior center, teen center, art and preschool spaces, multipurpose spaces and support facilities. The initial phase is now in design and construction will start in late 2009. The project is LEED registered, and the design includes strategies for water and energy conservation with the pool filtration and HVAC systems.
Medical Office Building, Bellevue, Washington: This project posits a conceptual design for a new medical office building in an area of a city being rezoned to higher density. Although adjacent to the downtown core, this area currently houses single-story suburban office buildings surrounded with surface parking. Future planning allows construction to a maximum height of five stories and calls for the area to be served by a major public transportation hub. As the first project within the new zoning allowance, the MOB finds its form in response to the anticipated increases in building and pedestrian density and the general “urbanization” of the area. Project goals: Transform the typology of medical office buildings to serve as a catalyst for meaningful “city making.” Transcend the limits of traditional “Building and Site Design” for medical office buildings and propose a new paradigm of fully engaged “Urban Design.”
Machias Elementary School, Snohomish School District , Snohomish, Washington: The new Machias Elementary School showcases the community's heritage through an exploration and expansion of its rural identity, which was accomplished by : A connection to the land: The school is oriented with all classroom neighborhoods facing the woods. An open playfield in front of the school replicates historic rural development patterns in which the farmhouse is located behind the fields. Frugality, the use of materials at hand: Curved beams salvaged from the original school are reused as arching columns, generating a curvilinear form reminiscent of your grandfather’s barn. The circulation and communal learning spaces such as the library, interdisciplinary learning lab, and resource classroom reside within the building's free-flowing core. Self Sufficiency and Independence: A super-insulated building envelope with triple-glazed windows and spray-foam wall insulation, ground-loop heat exchangers, and a 100Kw photovoltaic array estimated to generate enough electricity for approximately 18% of the building’s energy needs are a significant start toward independence. No fossil fuels are used to operate a building estimated to use 73% less energy than a code-minimum building.
Campus Classroom Building, Spokane Falls Community College, Spokane, Washington: The new 54,000-square-foot Campus Classroom Building, which will earn LEED Silver certification at minimum, occupies a prominent site at SFCC. The building is designed as two perpendicular, contrasting wings to complement and enhance important features of the campus. A more dominant, transparent classroom wing of glass, concrete and metal panel visually connects the building’s interior teaching and learning environments with the rest of the campus by its location adjacent to the major pedestrian walk linking the campus together. A contrasting, more academic, primarily brick wing houses the campus administration, a tutoring center, service learning center and community engagement offices. The east façade of this more traditional brick architecture defines one side of a new campus quad that terminates at the existing library.
Bellevue High School, Bellevue School District - Bellevue, Washington: The design focus of the new Bellevue High School was to celebrate sustainability through harmony with nature. The new entry icon set this tone as it is a cascading waterfall of roof water that spills into a rain garden between two planes of red brick masonry. The red brick, as well as the recycled sculpture in the glass lobby, are in deference to the school it has replaced. Other sustainable features include proper solar orientation for perimeter daylighting, clearstories for internal borrowed daylighting, flat plate heat exchangers, a thermal displacement ventilation mechanical system for variable indoor air quality and energy efficiency, green roofs, rain gardens, photovoltaic electricity harvesting capacity on the roof, user interface for mechanical data, recycled materials where possible with project phasing. The planning of the school left the baseball, softball, football fields and tennis courts, as well as the gym and lockers in place. Vehicular and pedestrian circulation was reconfigured to provide safer and easier access. The center point of the school is the new commons that looks south across “wolverine plaza” onto the football field and looks north across the “community plaza” to views of the city skyline. The commons is the transition space from the event functions to the east, such as the performing arts center, the three Gymnasiums and the more private academic, administrative and career technology education functions to west. The school's learning model maintains its current departmental approach, but by centrally locating the science department it can easily adapt to a personalized learning center, academy or integrated learning approach to educational delivery.
Grant County Skills Center, Moses Lake, Washington; The new Grant County Skills Center, located in Moses Lake, will annually benefit approximately 300 high school students from 11 regional school districts by preparing them with skills and certifications for highly desirable family-wage jobs in the local economy. The 43,000-square-foot Phase 1 facility on 8.25 acres will house state-of-the-art laboratories, classrooms, technology, and extensive equipment in support of programs in Culinary Arts, Pre-Engineering, Design and Construction, Manufacturing and Welding Technology, Pre-Nursing, and Dental Assisting. NAC|Architecture assisted in evaluation of potential sites, development of the comprehensive project budget, determination of required facilities to support the various skills departments, and assessment of how this somewhat non-traditional educational facility may implement high-performance strategies in pursuit of Washington Sustainable Schools Protocol (WSSP) achievement. The Phase 1 design sensitively considers how the future approximately 20,000-square-foot Phase 2 will be added, including provision for expanded indoor shop and outdoor work areas to support the planned Automotive Technologies addition and other as yet undefined skills spaces.
Riverview Elementary School, Snohomish, Washington: The design concept focuses on creating a “school in a park,” using the existing wetland on the property as an amenity to connect the school to its natural environment. Offsetting the classroom wings allows transparency to the open courtyards to penetrate deep into the heart of the school. Inside, groups of classrooms are clustered around shared learning areas, with transparency between the spaces in each group and to the outdoors. The tall central hallway acts as both a physical and a social connector, creating a permeable public space linking shared components of the school: the main entry, IDEA lab, library, gymnasium, commons and music room. The school will be a model of environmental stewardship and one of the most advanced sustainable designs for school facilities in the state. Learning opportunities abound, through exposed structural, mechanical and electrical systems; a wetland-buffer nature trail; geological timeline walkway; and an interactive touch screen displaying real-time energy-use data for the building. The school uses ground-loop heat exchange for heating and cooling, linked to closed-loop piping that circulates through 84 345-foot-deep geothermal bores under the school’s parking lots and rain gardens. The system uses no fossil fuels on site. Classrooms will be served by thermal displacement ventilation for high indoor air quality and efficiency. Building efficiency is further improved due to a super-insulated envelope (R-42 walls, R-22 roof and triple-pane windows). Riverview will have 100kW of photovoltaic solar-panel power generation, which will provide 18% of the total energy use. The combination of these features makes the school’s estimated energy use 73% below the energy use of a minimum code-compliant building.
Deer Park High School, Deer Park School District, Deer Park, Washington; While still in design phase, Deer Park High School’s design has evolved with input received through a series of meetings with the Design Advisory Committee, which includes representatives from administration, teachers, staff and facilities staff. The new plan results in a total of 146,236 square feet of renovated and added area. Site design includes expanded parking for all users and a bus loop that surrounds the school. The bus loop also provides access for emergency and delivery vehicles. Pedestrian paths link the parking to two significant entry plazas. The most prominent entry plaza fronts the commons and serves not only as the main entry to the school but also as part of a secondary entry between the library and the administration area. A second entry plaza is located to the north between the new performing arts wing and the auxiliary gym. This plaza will be developed as the primary events entry.
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