Education — in the K-12 world and beyond — is rapidly evolving in significant social, cultural, and pedagogical directions. Innovative schools take on a wide range of social and cultural challenges in their ultimate mission to prepare students for a dynamic future. Incorporating new technologies, reaching out to support under-served and disenfranchised groups, nurturing creative thinking, and engaging the business community are just some of the ways that creative schools are re-defining public education.
Today’s approach to K-12 innovation is all about flexibility and change. School architecture is driven by pedagogy, which is profoundly affected by the fluid development of information and classroom technologies. Learning, subject to this type of broad evolution, calls for the architecture itself to be less about a building and more an operable, adaptable platform. The Samohi Discovery Building exemplifies this important trend.
This project has been a rich and collegial collaboration between two architectural firms — Moore Ruble Yudell and HED — a very engaged client / owner, and a deep consultant team. Intensive workshops with teachers, students, and administration fed into the design. The project is part of a multi-phased redevelopment and replacement plan for the historic campus, and includes a new aquatic center.
This project represents a new approach to long term building for a community, and to blending public and private uses for mutual benefit. The new Discovery Building at Santa Monica High School was conceived as an open building. It considers the whole building as a learning environment that anticipates change.
Open Building principles guided every aspect of design, which will ensure that it is adaptable not just to evolving teaching methods during its use as a high school, but also to other potential uses in the future, as the community and region themselves evolve. And in its current form, several aspects of the building are open to community and private uses at alternate hours. This is the kind of broad thinking and designed-for-resilience-and-adaptation approach that more and more private and public buildings are embracing around the world. Open building is a key paradigm for the future, not only for buildings in the School District but for all educational buildings.
Samohi has its own broader role in the city of Santa Monica, with a variety of school and non-school programs that bring the public onto campus throughout the year. Balancing off hours public access with normal daily security relies on smart campus planning, with clear, efficient movement of visitors from limited entry points to the particular venues for events. The new building’s large Dining and Assembly Hall and smaller Multi-use Commons provide venues for off-hours public use, strategically located adjacent to a main pedestrian entrance.
Opening day signals completion for many buildings. For Discovery it marks the beginning of an educational journey.
Dr. Antonio Shelton, the School Principal, mentioned this, and noted that he now has a hard time getting students to go home after school. Students lingering offers strong testimony to the building’s success.
Learn more about this project through the voices of the students, teachers, administrators and designers in this video and via recent articles in Architectural Record and Fast Company.
