Abstract

The objective it to create a community school which provides an opportunity for the disparate community groups to equally use the facilities. The school is thus conceived as a transformative institution which functions simultaneously as a school and civic cultural center. The school is transformative in its nature as it meets the needs of its various school and community users throughout the course of the day and the week. Currently the design is imagined as an integration of three systems: the natural landscape, the interconnected spaces of the classrooms, and the volumes housing the shared school and community resources. The classroom spaces are flexible such that they can be broken into smaller learning communities or expanded for larger group activities. The shared school and community volumes are broken into three focuses: the primary is the media center, followed by the fitness center and the performing and visual arts center. These shared programmatic volumes are to reach out to the community and activate the currently abandoned site. For example, the fitness volume could be open in the early morning to the community, then during the day it would be available to the students for physical education classes and finally in the evening open as a community health club. Currently the surrounding communities are isolated. The community school program is to ideally bring together the separated communities to create an enriched cultural environment for everyone.