(BDT_19_063) Common Ground High School

Description

The Common Ground High School is situated on the outskirts of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, at the edge of the West Rock Ridge State Park. It is an environmental charter school, with a focus on environmental issues from a local to a global scale. It provides education for high school age students, preparing them for college and later life during the school day, and also provides educational services to younger children and adults in the form of after-school programs. All learning incorporates environmental themes, with a curriculum that includes topics such as urban agriculture and sustainable land management. Teaching takes place across three locations; the City of New Haven, CT, West Rock State Park and the 20-acre Common Ground campus. Since its founding year 1997, the school had to expand several times due to its growing student body; for this latest extension the school board opted for the New Haven office Gray Organschi Architecture because of their attention to craftsmanship and materials.

The new building and its external spaces tie together existing elements on the school’s campus, including farm buildings, agricultural fields, upland forests, and a wetland habitat. Together, these make up a ‘working landscape and outdoor classroom.’ The building aims to reflect the school’s focus on environmental issues and sustainability, through its construction and environmental strategies, its approach to the surrounding context and its use as a learning tool.

This building forms a working part of an active school, responding to the site’s approaches, topography, and existing structures. It acts as a facilitator; subtly organizing the site, orienting the visitor and enabling effective use of facilities – it is not a precious object that calls to be viewed from a distance.

The building is a measured addition to the site; its sawtooth form and choice of simple materials is reminiscent of agricultural and industrial building types – an appropriate decision for its client and context. While the building’s presence may seem quiet and simple, it is also memorable. The rooflights incorporated in the sawtooth roof flood the large, open spaces below with light and the projecting first floor entrance is signaled by an elegant chimney-like protrusion. It is the architectural quality that brings out the special in the normal here – the thoughtfulness in the layout of the site, the use, quality and detailing of materials, and the reflection of the school’s ethos.

The building itself purposefully reflects the curriculum through its environmental, structural and material expression. A clear aim for the scheme was to make ‘legible and potentially instructive’ the building’s ecological and construction technologies, letting it serve as an ‘environmental exemplar’ and therefore a pedagogical tool.

The building (Builder: Newfield Construction) uses a combination of cross-laminated timber (one of the first in the USA at the time to use this as primary structure), glue-laminated rafters and timber trusses, with mass timber materials being sourced around 600 km away in Quebec and then manufactured in nearby New Hampshire. These material choices, with specific regard to the amount of carbon timber can store, means that the building will be carbon neutral within its first decade of operation. Further, the combination of prefabrication and low impact construction methods resulted in very little damage to the site. Once the foundations had been poured, a crew of five workers with light tools and a mobile crane erected the buildings in just five weeks.

The building is served by both passive and active strategies to meet its environmental needs. The use of passive solar lighting and heating technology, solar PV panels and a system of ground source heat pumps, both of which contribute to the heating and cooling of the building, all alleviate the building’s energy consumption and cost. Further, stormwater is recycled through rain gardens, bioremediation pools and low-energy irrigation systems, significantly reducing the school’s water consumption and easing pressure on the city’s stormwater sewers.

The building becomes a pedagogical tool when used as an educational device; the building materials, structural qualities, and environmental technologies are studied and this approach “introduces the science to the students in a way that is relevant to them”, as one of the teachers described it. (Architectural Record, January 2017). This approach to sustainability allows the building to function holistically as a part of the site and the school’s daily life, and reinforces the focus of its curriculum and its ethos.