Completion Date: 8/30/2018
Square Footage: 125000
Building Use: Career Technical Education
Location: Eastvale, California
Project Description:
Community Environment:
One of the challenges of building this “school within a school” is finding the balance between creating a strong sense of identity for this specialized new campus and fostering an inclusive environment where eSTEM and ERHS students alike feel welcome. This quotient shapes everything from the program, to building and site design, to establishing site location. But as important as the connection between campuses, is the great sensitivity to respecting the privacy of immediately adjacent neighboring homes, complicating this balancing act.
The process of community engagement began well before the start of the architectural planning process. CNUSD based their decision to build a state-of-the-art STEM learning facility on strong community need in the medical and engineering professions. The district engaged local colleges and universities, and prominent professionals in the aforementioned fields early on to gain a better understanding of the skills a graduating student needs in order to succeed in both higher education and work placement. During the Planning Process, formalized relationships were made with local colleges and businesses to ensure eSTEM students are able to earn college credits and engage in professional internships.
The eSTEM facility offers learners real-world environments, outfitted with
Learning Environment:
The overarching themes established during programming were collaboration, access, partnership and flexibility. As a result, learning studios are flexible as possible to allow for multiple teaching modalities and the ability to evolve with future unknowns. Health/medical and engineering labs; while completely open, connected and zoned largely by furniture, ceiling changes, casework, minimal partial-height and operable walls; are outfitted to recreate real-world environments. They are connected to, and integrated with, both learning studios and shared colabs to allow for interdisciplinary collaboration. Think “spark” tanks can be found sprinkled throughout campus to offer opportunities to do the same on a smaller, more intimate scale. Outdoor labs take many forms, including floating learning pods, and can be found on each floor of this 3-story campus. The combination of numerous, dispersed, and varied learning spaces of all kinds, coupled with visibility and access, encourages learning and collaboration to happen everywhere.
Physical Environment:
eSTEM Academy will stand where Eleanor Roosevelt High School’s practice softball field sits today. A condensed 3-acre site locked in between residences, playfields, and straddled by two fire roads, starts to establish very clear site parameters. To maximize outdoor learning space and create a distance buffer from houses, program is consolidated into a 3-story footprint. To maintain visual and pedestrian connection with ERHS and facilitate a phased delivery method, program is further divided into 2 buildings with a courtyard quad between them.
Design:
A building fostering STEM education should be a teaching tool in and of itself. The idea that its architecture responds appropriately to sun, wind, and surrounding context; its building systems are exposed and celebrated; and its site clearly and elegantly demonstrates its response to storm water treatment is service that must be paid to the bright minds dedicated to learning in it.
High Performance:
In the earliest stages of schematic design, extensive site analysis was performed not only by the architectural and engineering design team, but by a wind consultant as well, due to the site’s high valley location. The northern building wing rotates 10-degrees clockwise to protect the internal campus courtyard from harsh Santa Ana winds while screens on the west side of campus mitigate strong prevailing breezes. The building’s east-west orientation maximizes northern daylighting, while strategic screening elements minimize heat gain and glare from the south and visibility to the westerly houses. Operable windows encourage airflow through learning spaces to supplement the mechanical system. The campus collects storm water from the building roofs and quad and treats it within infiltration planters strategically located around the site, cleansing the water prior to leaving the campus.
Planning Process:
Over the course of a two month long programming phase, an enthusiastic team of over 50 members—students, parents, teachers, administrators, affiliate college professors and deans, district and board members, city council members, professionals from the local medical and engineering communities, and a design team of architects, landscape architects, interior designers and professional learning experts—formed four subcommittees to be able to better focus on the following:
• Discovering the needs of the community in order to define STEM pathways to ready students for in-demand careers in the health/medical and engineering industries
• Collaborating with Eleanor Roosevelt High School and Corona-Norco Unified School District to fully understand the ideal relationship between a new 1,000-student STEM campus addition and an existing school site of 4,000 students
• Exploring other successful projects demonstrating applicable attributes like flexibility, visibility, connectedness and student-centeredness
• Researching the future-ready learner profile of an eSTEM student and the curriculum, teaching methodologies and built environment to support them
The result of this effort was a team-authored, board-approved Educational Vision Document to serve as the foundation for the design process.
C.O.T.E. | Committee on the Environment
Submitted By: |
LPA, Inc. |
Design Architect: |
LPA, Inc. |
Associate Architect or Firm: |
LPA, Inc. |
Landscape Architect: |
LPA, Inc. |
Owner / Developer: |
Corona-Norco Unified School District |
Engineer: |
LPA, Inc. |
General Contractor: |
|
Consultant: |
|
Photographer: |
LPA, Inc. Shimahara Renderings |
Eastvale STEM Academy
Category
Commercial
Description
The jury noted that the architect clearly spent a long time on the process of planning the building and they appreciated how that process yielded this project. They particularly liked the quality of the interior spaces.
Congratulations LPA, Inc.
Winner Status
- Citation Award