Renovations and additions to Washington, DC’s Brightwood Elementary School (above and below) resulted in new flexible and diverse spaces needed to support the curriculum. The classrooms are now organized into child-scaled “neighborhoods.”
plans is both an asset and a challenge. For example, buildings from the early to mid 20th century often are best suited to housing classrooms. Many are simply comprised of a repeated classroom module of somewhere around 700 to 900 square feet. Spaces such as science labs, art rooms, music rooms, and media centers may not fit within these repeated modules. Limited floor plans don’t readily accommodate the addition of smaller spaces such as administrative offices, resource rooms, bathrooms, and elevators. If this is the case, the evaluation should consider whether an addition can “unlock” the potential of the existing building, enabling it to thrive in the 21st century. Maximum Results Originally built in 1926, Brightwood Elementary School in Washington, DC, is a perfect example of a good classroom building with many positive attributes. Internally, with some adjustment, the existing classrooms were large enough, they were reasonably well-proportioned, and they had access to plentiful natural light. However, the building only had bathrooms on the ground floor, it did not provide the diversity of spaces (large and small) necessary for a modern program, its infrastructure was obsolete, and it was inaccessible. An architectural and design evaluation concluded that these shortcomings could be resolved through two additions that would, in conjunction with the existing building, provide the variety and types of spaces, services, infrastructure, and organization necessary for a contemporary elementary school curriculum. The first addition created a commons building that provides a place for shared resources that would not easily fit within the existing building. These include administrative offices, gym, cafeteria, art and music rooms, and a media center. Collected together with an accessible new front door, an elevator, and a
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central mechanical room, these programmatic elements created a community center shared by the school and the neighborhood. A second smaller classroom addition replaced the multipurpose room and complemented the classrooms in the existing building, creating a central gathering space and helping to reorganize all of the classrooms into child-scaled “neighborhoods.” Similarly, The School Without Walls Senior High School in Washington, DC, a small, residentially scaled urban schoolhouse dating to 1882, was renewed through an addition that enabled the 19th century building to do what it does best—provide large, flexible classrooms with a distinctive character. Like Brightwood Elementary, the new addition made the existing building accessible and provided large and small spaces ranging from bathrooms to science and art labs, a media center, a roof terrace, and a commons. Even if an existing building is significantly undersized, with the right site, it can become the core of a 21st century school. At 17,000 square feet, the 1932 vintage Stoddert Elementary School building was less than a third of the size needed to support the educational program. Plus, as an old prototypical classroom building, the facility did not offer any common spaces. Once a 48,000square-foot addition is completed, the revitalized campus will feature new classrooms and shared resources that will be used jointly by the school and the Department of Parks and Recreation. With the addition and a ground source heat pump system (geothermal), this little, old school building will achieve LEED Gold. In each of these case studies, the additions enabled the existing buildings to remain more than viable into the future and helped meet the needs of students, educators, and the community. The combination of new and existing buildings enabled reprogramming, reorganization, and the provision of new learning resources and sustainable infrastructure, while celebrating the continued vitality and sustainability of these essential and long-serving community assets. Sometimes, however, the building is not the issue, it’s the site. Quite simply, more parking or additional athletic fields require space. Acquiring an adjacent site may be one approach, but if that’s not an option, a policy-driven solution might be in order. The small neighborhood-oriented sites that are typically associated with existing schools—and where parking issues are common— often have access to walkable, transit-oriented resources. An innovative Transportation Demand Management (TDM) measure, for example, provides incentives for pursuing designs that encourage walking, biking, use of mass transit, and carpooling. Similarly, when the need for athletic fields exceeds a site’s capacity, consider joint use of a nearby park or the creation of