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L - More Highschool
Course: CORE II STUDIO
Year:
SPRING 2021
Instructor: ERICA GOETZ
This project looks at an abandoned and vacant elementary school, P.S. 64, located at the lot of 605 East 9th Street in the East Village of Manhattan. Built in 1906, the building is a classic Snyder H-block plan, designed by the architect CBJ Snyder. The project is to design a public school serving children in grades K-8. The program, which includes classrooms, laboratories, play spaces, assembly spaces and student services, reflects that of a current New York City joint elementary grades K-5 and middle school grades 6-8 school. A school is not just textbooks and teachers, but also an environment essential to children’s education and growth. The building itself is the “third teacher”: the multi-dimensional school environment inspires and nurtures children by activating all their senses. In its most manifestation, the school not only enriches each student and fosters their learning, but also acts as an interactive theater, a foundation for the entire community. The current state of individual rooms, separate floors, and blocked circulations, do not serve the purpose of an educational institution that reflects ever-changing cultural and social values for joy, fulfillment, and learning. What is the classroom of today? What form should the school take relative to its aspirational and varied users, and to its surroundings and community? And how can we design a building now that will keep pace with our own evolution of ideas, tools and pedagogies? With these questions in mind, the design focused on the middle portion of the school between the two bars. It ought to be redesigned to better connect the two sides of the school, and promote interactions between students and the community.
1.Spatial Prototype - Parts And Modules
2.Spatial Prototype - Combination of Modules
3.Types of Staircase4.Seven Window Views5.Before and After6.Ground Floor Plan7.2nd and 3rd Floor Plan8.Section of Small Classrooms9.Cross Section10.Longitudinal SectionThe project starts with a spatial prototype (drawing 1), folding continuous surfaces to create intertwined spaces. Drawing 2 shows various sizes of open and close spaces created by cutting and folding operations of vertical and horizontal surfaces. Drawing 3 adds a critical element in this project, the staircase. Different types of staircases insert into the folded surfaces to connect them. Drawing 4 shows how staircases and passage openings cutted in the wall surface transform a fixed and divided surface and give rise to new typologies. Drawing 5 is the before and after axonometric view of the original P.S. 64 school and the proposed design. Here the complicated folding surface is simplified into a wall with floor plates folded out from the wall. The middle bar of the “H” shape is removed and 5 huge walls inserted into the middle part and extends to the site boundary. The ground floor plan (drawing 6) shows a new physical condition of schools — light, air, space, and communal space — a huge inner courtyard with basketball court, badminton court, sports ground, and community garden. It maximized the amount of natural light from the skylight and huge window opening. Individual classrooms remain in the side bars with windows to receive natural light and fresh air. The skylight and big space area in the middle brings light deep into the building and provides accessible interior play space. The 2nd and 3rd floor (drawing 7) shows bright and airy big classrooms such as art classroom, kitchen/cafeteria, music classroom, and library, providing a relief from the crowded spaces in the sidebar. It also has open to below space in the upper levels. Egress staircases and elevators hide inside the poche of the thick wall. Drawing 8 shows a view from the corridor looking into the small classroom in the sidebar, and the middle courtyard at far. The designdissolves the boundary of the classroom, connecting small classrooms to big open air workspaces through large openings, fostering an open environment of “learning through living”. Drawing 9 -10 are a cross section and a longitudinal section showing stacked small classrooms at sidebar, and walls with big openings and staircases leading students to open air programs in the middle. This communal space infiltrates a condition best fit today's student — light and air in the middle courtyard, quiet space to concentrate at sidebar, access to the outdoors, friendship with their peers and the fundamental academic foundations to pursue a life of joy and purpose.