Three’s Company
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| The school’s three wings create a large courtyard with a central ellipse, which functions as an outside performance space. To the right of the school, two former gravel pits were turned into sunken playing fields. |
For Rochester Community Schools in Michigan, the third time’s a charm. The district suffered two failed bond packages before finally passing one on the third try and receiving $100 million to build the new Stoney Creek High School, as well as renovate two existing high schools. Voters rejected the first bond because it called for expansion of the district’s two high schools, with no mention of a third facility. The community didn’t want two huge schools, according to Deb Walter, former bond liaison and the district’s current director of facility operations. The second bond failed because voters thought the amount was too high. On try number three, the bond passed after a few projects were removed from the package-including technology upgrades and a new bus garage-and the new $44 million Stoney Creek High School was on its way.
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Stoney Creek High School Architect: French Associates |
Although construction of the 320,000-square-foot high school occurred only after two initial bonds failed, it hardly can be said to have an auspicious beginning. It is not unusual for voters to reject bond proposals, especially in this economic climate, and the situation faced by Rochester Community Schools is one with which most school districts can relate-and sympathize. Another challenge commonly faced by school districts is site selection, as it’s getting harder and harder to find large parcels of good land. The 72-acre site on which Stoney Creek High School stands is a former gravel mine and is punctuated by two, 30-foot-deep gravel "bowls" mined into the earth. Additionally, the site includes a wetlands area that site planners had to take into consideration.
Triple Play
If three is indeed the district’s lucky number, then good fortune carried over to the design of this facility, the district’s third high school. Stoney Creek is a completely new facility and, while new construction always allows greater freedom and flexibility than does a remodel or expansion of existing facilities, district officials wanted the school to serve as a template for work that later would be carried out at the other two high schools, as they underwent makeovers.
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| Locker pods are low to the ground so activity within the spaces can be monitored. |
Paul Corneliussen, senior associate at French Associates, the Rochester, Mich., architecture firm designing the school, knew that many elements included in this school would be reused by the district, so flexibility was of utmost importance. For that reason, Corneliussen relied heavily on his relationship with Deb Walter, whose job it was "to choreograph the planning process with the users, administration, and ourselves." Corneliussen said the district had developed educational specifications-guidelines that he refers to as the "cookbook"-and that Walter’s role was to act as a communication link, making sure the design team adhered to the educational specs.
How individual spaces fit into the educational specs was decided over a four-month period, during which the architects went through a series of planning sessions with representatives of the different user groups-such as art teachers or science teachers-and talked about what features and what kind of spaces they wanted. Corneliussen says this format made the project successful because "everyone felt like they had some authorship into the planning process."
Walter says of her role as the single owner-representative on the design team, that she looked for what student opportunities existed. Knowing that items included in the new Stoney Creek High School would find their way into the two existing high schools once they were remodeled, she made sure there was parity among the three schools; her concern was working out a educational program that created equal opportunities for students and teachers at all schools. "I know that existing conditions required some changes," Walter says, but she wanted features to be flexible enough in their design to transfer as ideas, if not as exact replicas. She looked for the "ability to be flexible within a building." Examples include the art, science, and athletic departments having duplicate facilities-in feature content if not design-so students at any of the three high schools could have equal educational opportunities.
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PROJECT DATA Auditorium Furniture: Irwin Seating |
Walter says another reason she greatly championed the idea of flexibility is because her goal was to create school facilities that adapt to changes without the need for costly remodels. "We know how we want to use [the school] now, but it’s difficult to predict what things will be like 20 years from now," she explains.
Three-Year Design and Construction Process
Following a 36-month design and construction process, the 1,500-student high school was completed in fall 2000, but has yet to officially open. The facility has been used as a "swing" school, housing students displaced from other schools that are undergoing remodeling. Its first regular student population will occupy the building starting with the 2002-2003 school year. "We’ve been able to use it in so many ways before we even open it," says Deb Walter, proudly pointing out how Stoney Creek’s use as a swing school successfully demonstrates its flexible design.
The facility that the first regular student population will enjoy is a three-story school that Corneliussen says was designed around a campus philosophy so it wouldn’t feel like "one big box of a high school." Some of the earliest meetings with various user groups revealed the demand for daylighting, so the building has a large perimeter that gives every teaching space an exterior view and a natural light source. Such a large perimeter is possible because the building layout consists of three wings surrounding a grand courtyard, which is the focal point of the high school. Inside the courtyard is a large, inclined ellipse that can be used as an outside performance space. Additionally, a portion of courtyard connects to the cafeteria allowing al fresco dining.
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| Located at the entrance to each "house," skylights bring natural light into interior spaces. Visible behind the railing are the interior, floor-to-ceiling corner windows that further open sightlines. |
Other ideas developed during initial meetings and included in the school’s final design include staff planning/meeting rooms where each "house" has a central work area where staff can collaborate with colleagues, share notes, or prepare lesson plans. While these spaces are expressly for staff use, there are student group rooms, measuring approximately 150 square feet, sprinkled throughout the houses. In addition to the various group rooms, each house consists of approximately 10 classrooms, and the houses themselves can be set up in a variety of ways. Corneliussen explains that the school can create a house for each disciple, such as an English or math house, or set them up for grade level or even mix it up and offer a variety of classes within each house. Education can be centralized or decentralized depending on need, and the same philosophy of flexibility serves as a template for reworking the classroom setup at the two existing high schools. Additionally, each house includes decentralized administration offices for use by an assistant principal or grade-level principal.
Third Watch
As with most current school construction projects, safety and security played a role in the design of Stoney Creek High School. The layout allows open sightlines throughout the facility so blind corners and secluded spots are eliminated. Corner classrooms and offices have windows at their corners so hallway traffic is always visible. Low profile locker pods-two per house-keep full-size lockers low to the ground so activity within the pods can be monitored. Additionally, passkey card systems control access to the facility, allowing entrance to the building at only four locations. Card systems at those doorways monitor all entrance and exiting activity.
These days, however, safety not only refers to physical elements but also to indoor air quality (IAQ), which has become as big a safety concern as security cameras and passkeys. Corneliussen says that, on the topic of IAQ, "that’s probably where [the district] shines the most." Rochester Community Schools developed a sophisticated environmental health and safety policy more than a decade ago with guidelines for IAQ that exceed current minimum code criteria. As one example, says Corneliussen, the school uses 33% more outdoor air than code requires. The complete guidelines can be found on the district’s Web site at www.rochester.k12.mi.us.
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| The circular media center is located at the center of the school and looks out onto the school’s courtyard. |
Two items on which there were no safety guidelines were the deep, bowl-shaped gravel pits that very clearly were site hazards. Instead of going through the expense of refilling them, they instead underwent some fitting and reshaping and were turned into two sunken athletic stadiums. The sloped edges provided the perfect foundation for bleacher placement and, with field lights placed lower to the ground and the earth helping to muffle noise levels, the impact the two stadiums have on neighboring houses is minimal. While three seems to be a very good number for the district, it also seems lucky that the site didn’t have a third gravel pit, as construction crews are just now completing work on the two.