IRVINE, Calif. — Irvine Unified School District’s (USD) recently completed Portola High School opened in time for the 2016-17 school year this past August. While the project not only met the school district’s fast-paced scheduling needs, it also meets criteria developed by High Performance Index Schools, created to improve student success by providing high-performance learning environments.

The $126 million high school was built to accommodate up to 2,400 students on a 43-acre site made up of 16 campus buildings, three parking lots, an aquatics facility, football stadium, varsity softball and baseball fields as well as other outdoor field facilities. Locally based C.W. Driver Companies built the facility, while Los Angeles-based HMC Architects served as the architect.

On the inside, the Portola High School campus includes high-tech classrooms; a student union featuring collaborative learning environments and common areas; a Learning Commons with a media center that has quiet rooms and an “innovation lab;” an elective building that houses cutting-edge technologies and resources designed to inspire creativity and collaboration; video production, art and music rooms; dedicated science labs; special education facilities; a 2,044-seat gymnasium, locker room and classroom building; and a performing arts building with a 698-seat theater, black box theater, orchestra pit and second level balcony and dance studio.

“Twenty-first century learning is all about developing transformational collaboration and technical skills,” said Mac Byers, senior project manager with C.W. Driver. “Portola High School is designed to allow collaborative spaces for students as well as teachers. The campus is full of areas for kids to gather and work together.”

The Student Union and Student Learning buildings are constructed with this in mind. Teachers are not assigned a classroom like in traditional schools but instead have common workspaces. They then teach out of classrooms designed specifically for group learning with no particular front or head-of-the-class focus. Students learn in innovation labs, and Wi-Fi is available throughout the campus with multiple access points.

The main challenge of the Portola High School project was its fast construction schedule, according to Byers. That involved completing the 16-building campus in 20 months for the August 2016 opening.

“We addressed the challenge by essentially dividing a high school project into four elementary school-sized projects, running them all concurrently,” Byers said. “We achieved buy-in from all parties and experienced a high degree of coordination and preplanning with all parties with close schedule monitoring.  The team quickly and efficiently addressed challenges and never lost sight of the objective.”

Teamwork and team synergy can be a challenge on projects of this size, Byers continued. “With upwards of $7 million dollars of labor, materials and equipment being expended every month there is plenty of opportunity for teamwork to break down — not on this project,” Byers said. “The team stayed focused on the issues, addressed them with cool heads and continually persevered through to get the best possible solutions.”

Subcontractor cash flow is critical on a project that requires a large labor force on a project like this, and subcontractors typically can experience drains in cash flow of $1 million to $2 million between work and payment, according to Byers. “C.W. Driver and Irvine USD made a commitment to process monthly billings and change orders quickly to minimize that impact on subcontractors,” he added. “This effort on behalf of the subcontractors was met with a high degree of subcontractor cooperation on myriad issues.”

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MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — The $55 million Sciences Building recently debuted at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo as part of a large-scale renovation to boost the college’s environmental sustainability as well as its overall learning experience.

Irvine, Calif.-based C.W. Driver Companies built the three-story, 81,980-square-foot facility, which features 26 modern laboratories, classroom space and office space in addition to a 500-square-foot observatory with 22 student-accessible telescopes. School Construction News spoke with Brian Dougherty, senior partner at Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Dougherty+Dougherty Architects LLP, the architect on the project, to learn more about the facility’s advanced learning spaces and technologies.

Q: What advantages can the Sciences Building’s high-tech learning spaces offer students?

Dougherty: One of the core design parameters for the project is that learning occurs everywhere in the facility. This includes labs, classrooms, offices and public spaces. Within this context, it is the expectation that all occupants will have access to technology anytime, anywhere and on any device. The building is infused with wireless access ports and large bandwidth. As a result, students are able to exchange information between classes and online with the faculty throughout the day in every alcove within the building.

The advantage is that the entire building becomes an educational environment in a free-flowing and dynamic setting for learning. Within the formal teaching labs and classrooms, an integrated Crestron system draws all platforms into a universal portal for presenting, sharing and re-airing content. Faculty can broadcast to in-room projectors or from their computers and tablets while live streaming demonstrations both locally and remotely. This content is recorded for future reference, which allows students who may have missed a class to revisit the content on their own schedule, further enhancing their ability to absorb the material and integrate information across classes.

Q: What other key technologies are featured in the new Sciences Building? 

Dougherty: The Saddleback Sciences Building features technologies that are focused on both the student experience and the building operation. Certified as a LEED Gold project, the facility features systems that are highly integrated and aimed at the reduction of resource consumption while providing a healthy and active learning environment. The lighting and HVAC systems are integrated with the building management system to optimize energy consumption. Lighting controls allow auto adjustment of the illumination levels based on available sunlight.

With today’s concerns about student safety, the building access, both exterior and interior, is monitored and controlled from the campus police station and allows for remote lock down and modifications in addition to key-card entry, which records all movement within the building outside normal class hours.

Q: Is the observatory space common for facilities of this type, and what planning went into the design of that space?

Dougherty: Saddleback College, as a part of their science curriculum, has a very strong portfolio in astronomy and physics. This expanding area of study has struggled with the limited resources of the existing facility and has taken the opportunity with the new facility to create a setting that elevates their physical setting to match their aspirations. While it is not unusual to see small observatories at the college level it is unusual to find a commitment that provides the level of high-quality equipment with high student access in a very hands-on setting.

The large telescope has been placed within a state-of-the-art dome that is at the most remote edge of the campus to minimize both light pollution and building vibration. Through technology, the instruments can be accessed and controlled remotely from the main astronomy and physics labs in the new Sciences Building providing direct access to the experience of the telescope without the need to be physically in the same space. To augment this experience, an adjacent facility has been constructed to allow the day-to-day installation of an array of smaller telescopes, which can be directly operated by a full class in a more traditional setting.

Q: What were the biggest challenges on the project and how did you overcome those challenges?

Dougherty: The two greatest challenges for this project were the site and the complexity of the building systems. The Sciences Building is located at the base of a sloping site that links the original upper campus with the more recently developed lower campus. The underlying geologic formation challenged our engineering team to develop a foundation that would address the non-uniform subsurface formations and the programmatic desire to have the building create a vertical ‘bridge’ to link the campus. A matrix of drilled caissons taken, in some cases, more than 100 feet to bedrock underpin the structure to stabilize the subsurface conditions and provide a platform for the facility. All of this is interlaced with a dense array of infrastructure to serve the building systems. The use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) that integrated the architectural and engineering design with the contractor’s implementation of those systems allowed the team to develop a shared strategy for moving the project forward.

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