After SMMA’s thorough exploration of possible renovations and sites, the district decided to build a new facility.
The school was built on the old Memorial Park Elementary School site, adjacent to the middle/high school complex. The Jefferson School was demolished, and the land was cleared for the Parks Department. The former Esten School was converted into an early childhood center for all district-wide kindergarten students.
SMMA’s design creates a distinctive overall geometry for the school with five wings protruding from the building’s core.
This modular floor plan creates “pods” for each grade, where four classrooms are grouped in a neighborhood of rooms feeding into a common area that serves as a shared learning environment.
The core of the school includes a gymnasium, servery, and cafeteria, as well as makerspaces, a media center, and classrooms for music and the arts all enveloping an enclosed outdoor courtyard.
The interiors explore vibrant bursts of color and youthful design elements.
The Experiential Graphics
|The Experiential Graphics are designed to pique the students’ curiosity with interactive elements such as magnetic letters, dry erase maps, unique seating, sensory items, LEED signage, and colorful banners. The graphics feature a simple, geometric style that is universal and playful with a bright color palette.
Blues, yellows, and greens run throughout the school and are included in the various interactive environmental graphics that explore nature, music, community, and imagination.
Students are welcomed into the space by a wall reading “Imagination can take you anywhere” and ties in illustrations from graphics throughout the school, engaging students in an “I-Spy” activity.
The main entryway of the school comprises of multiple graphics with a common theme of community. One reads, “Be kind with your words and your actions,” atop a magnetic surface where students can rearrange letters to practice making words and sentences. Another other graphic reads, “We are better together” atop oversized dry-erase maps of the United States and the world, helping students learn geography.
Beside the school’s outdoor courtyard, a nature-themed wall connects the space to the school’s regional environment, featuring sensory items and native New England species like white oak trees and a white-tailed deer.
Outside the music room, a large instrument-themed graphic includes recessed nooks that students can sit in.
Age-appropriate LEED signage explains the sustainable design of the building itself, including a glossary of terms for the students. These signs match the design style of the walls and are placed strategically throughout the school in locations that match their subject matter. For example, the sign covering efficient lighting systems sits near the second-floor windows with a view of the vestibule’s LED light fixture.
The LEED signage throughout the school provides additional teaching moments, allowing the students to better understand the environment and the importance of sustainability.
Plaques that are ADA compliant include braille and raised lettering anywhere you see text in the school. While not mandated by building requirements, these elements allow the environmental graphics to be accessible to all students.
The school’s unique geometry was a challenge for our structural engineers to ensure the building is seismically sound.
Indoor Air Quality
|Typically, a school like Phelps Elementary would have seven or eight ERUs: one for each classroom pod, the admin area, cafeteria, gym, and custodial spaces.
Instead, the design features a system that uses two larger units connected by a ring duct that distributes air to all the spaces throughout the school. This consolidated system allows diversification of the ventilation block load by taking credit for the same person not being in the gym, cafeteria, media center, and classroom at the same time.
Additionally, the ring duct system allows the other unit to continue providing ventilation to the rest of the building, even if one unit is turned off for maintenance.
Using diversity decreases the unit sizes providing substantial upfront savings.
A reduced number of units comes with inherent advantages, including less structure, less roof screens, more PV area, and less maintenance, all for the cost of additional ductwork in the corridors. Additionally, each unit can cover more than half of the peak building load, which means they also have partial redundancy enough to cover the minimum building ventilation– a luxury more commonly found in labs or hospitals. This results in lower costs for the school.
