EDUCATION : HEADWAYS

Mindful of the many walks of life that students in the public school system in New York come from, I wanted to create an architectural sequence for a middle school in Sunset Park that did not impose a path for the students but rather offered them multiple paths and let them make their own most efficient, entertaining, or social able way through the building.

I designed three main ways of moving throughout the building—weaving in and out of the programmatic requirements and encouraging students to go their own way. If we want our spaces to inspire us, we need the autonomy to move through them freely.

During my explorations with the sequence of circulation — I refined the program to frame perspectives that lend themselves to an episodic experience of the building. The buildings opens itself up on the inside to the natural light without, and interior elements respond to one another. The resulting spaces are most simply delineated as solids and voids, and the interstitial spaces that the circulation carved from them. The scheme drew inspiration from the many scales of the city, how they may be interpreted and represented. Especially in how one student may navigate them.