Environmental Charter School

The Environmental Charter School of Pittsburgh’s mission is to provide a safe, healthy environment to educate engaged, active citizens of society. In this effort, the keystone of the success of a school lies in the ability of the school is in providing inspiring places for student to learn. As such, the private, school-centered spaces should be allocated sufficient space and positioned in a way benefiting students’ education. Even so, the ECS mission is lofty and believes that the school must also provide a permeable design that allows for community-space sharing, while ensuring the safety of learners and faculty members and implementing collaborative and independent spaces. As such, two imperative aspects of the project will be the maintenance of the safety of students while being inviting to community members and the variety of spaces accessible to the students in their learning experiences. 

The general massing of the project follows a modified bar format. Due to the site’s primary E-W axis, it provides a great opportunity to make use of the sun’s positioning to create well lit spaces indoors as well as provide plenty of outdoor space for the teachers and students to use. The orientation of the site hints to the use of the northern edge of the site for productivity dependent spaces such as the offices for administration, teachers, and faculty, as well as the studio classrooms. These spaces would be able to avoid glare and would experience day lit spaces optimal for visual and thermal comfort. Along the south, more public spaces would be positioned with green spaces and outdoor spaces to provide plenty of opportunities to get fresh air and shift learning spaces outdoors. This arrangement allows for sunlight to penetrate the southern facade of the building, creating contrasting lighting conditions suitable for more active learning as well as more sedentary learning. The project site rests along Penn Avenue which divides the residential context to the south from the commercial hallway created by the avenue. This presents an interesting condition where the Environmental Charter School can more easily engage in partnerships will organizations such as Assemble while remaining accessible to the general public. Furthermore, the green space within the Allegheny Cemetery across Penn Avenue also serves as a larger greenspace for students to explore and learn from which runs parallel to their mission and their way of teaching. The project’s proposed circulation strategy features two sets of stairs for vertical ascension on the east and west sides of the building connected by a long, straight hallway. This design provides a simplistic circulation route to prevent confusion. In addition, the linearity of the hallways allow for fewer blind spots, allowing the teachers to more easily check for any issues and also preventing problems such as bullying.

Given the commercial context to the north of and along Penn Avenue, the north facade maintains the tempo of the commercial hallway along the north street frontage using balconies and opening outdoor space along the north facade. Considering however, how the commercial zone to the north dissolves into a residential zone to the south, it was important to address this by also changing materiality from the commercial corrugated metal to brick which is more familiar to the residential houses to the south. This was also addressed by the drop in height from the commercial scale to the residential scale as the building approaches Comrie Way. The building attempts to break down its facade from the formal response to the Penn Avenue context to a smaller scale along the southern facade. This transition also uses the east and west facades as gradients to begin this transformation and dissolving to the south.

The ECS has allotted spaces on all floors to have a connection to the outdoors. From the balcony areas of the upper floors to the outdoor learning spaces and gardening spaces at grade, the design allows for occupants to experience and have a constant connection to the outside, thus generating a more comfortable and humane environment to teach, learn, and work in. The upper floors position balconies reaching towards the south, however the first floor not only opens into the green spaces but also the multipurpose space opens with large garage doors to both outdoor green spaces to the east and west. It is noticeable that the outdoor spaces are a bit unevenly distributed across the floors, which is alleviated by the fact that the first floor spaces are available to the public for use and that the upper floors share their outdoor space. The relationship between spaces on the upper floors differs from that of the first floor which generates a dialogue between the private administration spaces and the public spaces that surround it. On the upper floors, because ECS teachers are all assigned their own room, the classroom spaces are private spaces for each class which are flanked to the south by communal Study Hall spaces and Think Lab spaces. The more private spaces are occupied for more extended periods of time and, as a result, make use of northern day lit whereas the more public spaces are allowed to be contrastingly bright given the sunlight that illuminates these spaces. These spaces are protected to a certain degree by shading devices that hang over the balconies which can block out unwanted sunlight or be used to hang plants from.These spaces provide a more diverse set of spaces for the Environmental Charter School to work and allows for the teachers to have more flexibility in regards to their “classroom”. The project features landscaped green spaces, both for educational purposes and for planting/growing use that are available to the community. These spaces ultimately can help to give back to the community and serve as yet another potential way to form relationships with local businesses and neighbors.