Lanier High School Renovation

• Project highlights: Lanier High School 

• Architecture firm:  LPA
• Owner:  San Antonio Independent School District
• Location:  San Antonio
• Category:  General
• Project site: Previously developed
• Building program type(s):  Education - K-12 school

Located in San Antonio’s culturally vibrant Westside neighborhood, Lanier High School has been transformed from a windowless brick building with security, daylight, and infrastructure issues into a next-generation learning space. The school sits in the most economically disadvantaged part of the city and had long had explicitly blue-collar expectations for its students. This project helps redefine what’s possible for students. 

Before its renovation, Lanier High School’s logo was a gear, reflective of its vocational focus, evidenced by the recent addition of car mechanic spaces in the heart of the building. The team’s overarching goal was to elevate a spirited school community stuck in a facility at odds with community engagement, educational innovation, and high-performance design. The design revolves around the power of daylight and the vibrancy of the school’s predominantly Mexican-American culture. 

The project is the first of 99 schools in the district to include flexible learning spaces and a model for rethinking outdated educational programming specifications. Until Lanier’s renovation, the specifications consisted of few spaces outside of 10-foot-wide corridors and 800-square-foot classrooms with a single teaching wall. The design team offered different space types following an extensive user survey and a building analysis that proved there was room to support them. 

Through an efficient design for Lanier’s “base” program, the team was also able to program an array of spaces that include large classrooms with partitions, collaborative “light labs,” dining on the second floor, and a living library. The spaces are unique in that they reside within an incredibly deep footprint and often are not adjacent to exterior walls. Large holes in the second-floor waffle slab and light monitors on the roof help draw natural light into the middle of the sizeable building to animate and define the collaboration spaces throughout. The renovation has brought daylight and views to 100% percent of its spaces.

Numerous intense interventions along the school’s facade and to the structure speak to the team’s integrated design approach. In its previous condition, the school had no “front door” but many “back doors,” most of which lacked security and monitoring. The project creates a new campus gateway through a continuous, 64-foot slice of glass that runs along its north and south facades. 

The team was informed that since opening, the school has undergone a transformation akin to the Wizard of Oz, moving from black and white to brilliant color. As its principal reports, “ The energy is high, the morale is high!"