In this project, we pursued two related strategies. The first was form-based and continued our office’s research in augmented grounds as a means of blurring the normative distinctions between building and landscape, object and field. This approach informed how we sited the project and implemented the program. The second strategy had a social agenda: simply, it was concerned with school culture and the pedagogical impact of architecture. Based on our analysis of the current state of public secondary education, we treated the project as an urban problem, engendering intensification along the principal pedestrian “sidewalk” and creating open pockets for chance encounters and unprogrammed learning environments.
The site investigation focused on augmented landscape. Our office has been engaged with exploring the hybrid territory between building and site, attempting to transcend the traditional figure-ground opposition of passive site and active building. Here, there is no longer a neutral ground, it is all activated: structure and ground become progressively interchangeable, and the site becomes a manipulated landscape. The school’s organization emanates from this new conceptual surface.
A major focal point is the monumental stairway embedded in the hillside, which leads from the main school areas to the roof terrace and football field above while doubling as a student amphitheatre. The siting of the playing fields likewise took advantage of a natural slope to create an economically efficient seating area. In this way, the project takes its cues from the site, using topography as structure while articulating forms whose irregular and intersecting planes mirror the seismic thrusts of the Southern California landscape.
Two rows of fragmented forms are set tightly on either side of a long central “canyon,” or sidewalk, that cuts through the face of the hillside like a geologic fault line, marking the status of the campus as a reinterpreted landscape. The buildings’ angled walls and canted volumes establish a non-normative yet purposeful formal language, a series of discrete and ordered forms in the process of becoming. Cantilevered volumes project dramatically into space, and roofscapes fold and bend like shifting geologic plates.
The pedestrian street provides the primary opportunity for students to interact serendipitously or by plan with each other and with teachers and administrators. The sense of place we were aiming for is located in these interstitial spaces, as well as in the classrooms themselves. This pedestrian “freeway” manifests the school’s sense of community and also connotes an urban environment in stark juxtaposition to its suburban context. It generates an intensification of experience parallel to that found in urban spaces, where diverse elements cross haphazardly.
By creating clusters of semi-independent units that integrate various fields of study, the plan defines three distinct “schools within the school,” which foster team teaching and a more intimate educational setting. Lower and upper grades are focused in separate clusters of classrooms, while landscaped outdoor teaching areas act courtyards between buildings, punctuating the classroom units with views of mountains and sky. In this project, the high school’s goals of educational flexibility and social interaction between students, teachers, and administrators express themselves in a thoughtful and heterogeneous design.
