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CEFPI Program Honors Young School Designers

PORTLAND, Ore. — Six teams of middle school students from across the globe competed in October to design schools that could potentially change the way we think about education. The School of the Future Design Competition, hosted in Portland at the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) Annual Conference, challenged student designers to plan and design tomorrow’s 21st century learning environments.

Sponsored in collaboration with Tandus|Centiva, Interface, Shaw Contract Group, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Green Building Council, Cuningham Group Architecture Inc., SCHRADERGROUP Architects Inc. and MB Kahn Construction, the competition promotes schools that enhance student and teacher performance and contribute to community culture and vitality. It also focuses on enhancing innovative ways of teaching and learning, promoting health, conserving resources, engaging the surrounding community and responding to the environment.

More than 3,000 students representing nearly 100 school districts from all over North America and the United Kingdom participated in the 2014 School of the Future design program, which was recently rebranded as SchoolsNEXT. This 21st century learning program engages and empowers students through a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) curriculum to master the skills needed to succeed in the global economy. It also teaches students how to follow a facility planning process from concept to completion, with thorough documentation. The six top teams then presented their resulting projects to conference attendees.

Michael R. Null Middle School of Houston received the program’s Award of Excellence, while Sutter Middle School of Folsom, Calif. took home the Award of Distinction. The team from Norwalk Middle School in Norwalk, Iowa, was honored with the Award of Merit. Teams from iTech Preparatory in Vancouver, Wash; St. Michael’s Academy in Springfield, Mass.; and Thoreau Middle School of Vienna, Va. each earned Awards of Commendation.

Null Middle School’s winning design took both students and the broader community into account by establishing partnerships between multiple stakeholders. Constructed on the site of an abandoned landfill using recycled building materials, the proposed school exemplified reuse, recycle and repurpose, minimizing its effect on the ecosystem. It included a student café and homeless shelter, while also providing for a variety of learning styles, work-study programs and job training partnerships.

The Sutter Middle School team took a similar approach by integrating housing for foster and homeless children into their design, and including spaces for community learning partnerships and simulation workrooms for project based learning. Green technologies such as solar trees, self-repairing concrete and an aquaponics system also earned the team points.

Meanwhile Norwalk Middle School’s environmentally friendly design, essentially a 700-acre community master plan, employed Smart Growth principles that would equip students for life and serve as an economic engine for the community.

“Creating schools that inspire changes in education, empower students and engage the community, these young designers demonstrated great passion, enthusiasm, remarkable research and exceptional teamwork,” said David Schrader, AIA, LEED AP, jury chair and chair-elect, CEFPI. “Our future looks much brighter with them at the helm.”

Judy Hoskens, REFP, LEED AP, School of the Future Competition chair and CEFPI board member, added, “What these students did this year that was so powerful was to imbue their design solutions with empathy and meaning, and a desire to make a difference in the world.”

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Booker T. Washington STEM Academy Earns CEFPI MacConnell Award

WASHINGTON — The Booker T. Washington STEM Academy in Champaign, Ill. recently received the 2013 James D. MacConnell Award at the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) Annual Conference & Exposition in Indianapolis. Recognizing excellence in facility planning, the MacConnell Award is considered CEFPI’s most prestigious honor.

Originally built in 1951, the Booker T. Washington K-5 STEM Academy was the result of a response against segregation and disentitlement in a predominantly African-American community. Thanks to the efforts of local advocates, funds were also raised to construct both a community center and library adjacent to Booker T. Washington, creating a celebrated landmark site, overcoming adversity and encouraging community partnerships.

More than 50 years after its founding, the school’s original structure had fallen into disrepair and lacked many modern educational amenities. In response, the community again spearheaded the design and construction of a new facility. Officials selected an interdisciplinary team including Chicago-based Cannon Design and Bailey Edward to create the new building. The resulting facility replaced the aging 225-student structure in a largely underserved community with a modern, LEED Gold certified 425-student academy.

Today, the Booker T. Washington STEM Academy project is a wonderful example of what can happen when education intersects with physical environment. In keeping with the STEM philosophy (a focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the academy strives to educate the whole child in an exciting and stimulating learning environment. Booker T. Washington provides both a facility and a curriculum that help students think critically, ask questions, engage with both peers and educators, develop problem-solving skills and put science and mathematics into action.

The MacConnell Award recognizes the importance of a comprehensive planning process resulting in educational facilities that truly meet the needs of students, and faculty, while also serving the greater community. This prestigious design and construction award is presented to the architectural firm, school district, higher education institution, consultant and/or construction management firm whose project meets these requirements. Past recipients have included Missouri’s Joplin Interim High School, Marysville Getchell High School Campus of Marysville, Wash., and Lynwood High School in Bothell, Wash.

Though the James D. MacConnell Award is a great honor for the recipient, it also has a positive impact on the greater school design community. MacConnell Award jury chair, Renee Alexander, AIA, of BBT Architects Inc. commented, “The opportunity of participating in the 2013 MacConnell Award Jury has pushed me professionally to continue to grow, learn, and be better at what I and CEFPI do for the students in this world.”

Established in 1921, CEFPI remains the only worldwide professional organization whose principal purpose is improving the spaces in which children learn. The organization embraces a diverse group of professionals, all with the goal of building healthy, safe, high performing and sustainable learning environments that enhance both student and teacher performance, while also supporting community culture and vitality. The MacConnell Award was created in 1991 to honor the late member Dr. James D. MacConnell for his significant contributions to educational facility planning.

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HMFH Architects Awarded Project of Distinction

Concord, N.H. — With it’s colorful array of innovative and forward-thinking designs, Cambridge-based HMFH Architects was recently awarded a Project of Distinction Award from the Council of Education Facility Planners International (CEFPI) for their work on three elementary schools in Concord, N.H.
Considered exceptional and inspiring design by CEFPI, Abbot-Downing Elementary School, Christa McAuliffe Elementary School and Mill Brook Primary School were awarded Project of Distinction at the annual Northeast Region CEPI Exhibition of School Planning and Architecture. This year’s conference theme was educational renaissance.
“The layout is very different from most elementary schools and I think the jury saw that and wanted to bring that to other people’s recognition,” said Laura Wernick, AIA, LEED, senior principal at HMFH Architects and project director for the Concord elementary school projects. “This is a different way for schools to be organized that supports new thinking about how learning should take place in schools.”
The layout of each school is very much the same with the heart of each school being the multifunctioning learning commons. The learning commons of each school are situated in the center and surrounded by classrooms, which also have windows looking out into the corridor. The flexible facility includes spaces for group discussion, wet or messy projects, multimedia, amphitheater, story-telling, a book room, small project room and a reading nook for quiet, individual learning.
The deconstruction of the traditional library was the initial inspiration for the design, Wernick said.
“The idea is that instead of everyone going to a single library to do all these activities, let’s bring the libraries to the classrooms,” Wernick said. “This evolved over time into what became known as a learning commons.”
The firm relied upon the collaboration with the schools’ teachers and administrators in providing the most modern and inspiring educational designs to Concord area children. The design centered around three visionary ideas, which included that spaces should support collaborative learning; collaborative spaces should be easily accessible by faculty and students to integrate them into the day-to-day learning experience; and the spaces needed to provide a variety of flexible environments to support a range of learning activities.
“They saw that learning was happening in different ways,” Wernick said of the teachers and administrators of the schools. “They saw that technology was impacting how learning took place and they saw the library, and all the activities that took place there, as being too remote from the classrooms.”
The learning commons allows for a multitude of functions, from individual learning to whole grade levels coming together to collaborate on a project. This flexibility speaks to the educational theory that every child is different and requires different experiences in order to engage with their learning, Wernick said.
In designing the learning commons, HMFH paid special attention to the usage of natural light, provided quality acoustics and utilized different colors and patterns in the design to encourage creativity.
“At my firm we also believe very strongly that color and pattern and texture engage students because it helps make the space special,” Wernick said. “A place that’s colorful, has unusual patterns and images, and unusual special forms can help to inspire creativity in both the teachers and students while giving them a different way of thinking about problem solving.”
Acoustics are also essential to the design, Wernick said, because it is crucial that young children hear every word in instruction because it is more difficult for young students to gain context if they miss words.
The creative design of the learning commons at the three Concord, N.H. schools speaks to the mission of the areas educators and their emphasis on collaborative, inclusive and creative learning.
“If students are in a creative place they understand creativity is OK,” Wernick said. “When you’re sitting in rows in a very plain box space then you’re not being taught that creativity is fun, it’s part of life and it’s part of learning.”

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