Project-in-Design

Award of Merit

Valley Region Elementary School #6

Los Angeles Unified School District

MVE Institutional, Incorporated

This is a new elementary school programmed to serve 950 students on a 4.31 acre site.  The district was looking for a solution to meet the program and educational requirements, while at the same time blending the facility into the community on a site bounded by two- and three-story multi-family residences, single family homes, a church and a park.

Classrooms are clustered around multiple learning courtyards which are designed to provide an internal communal neighborhood within the campus plan. Each courtyard contributes differently to a selected learning curriculum of choice.  These gathering nodes open up to the center of campus and the play fields, maximizing the sense of open space, while being designed to be easily supervised at the same time.  The building forms have been largely influenced by the site’s context.  The classrooms along the western edge of the site front a single-family residential street, where the forms are similar in scale and simulate the undulation of the houses across the street.  They act as a sound barrier between the residences and the play area.  A public-friendly gathering plaza at the corner creates a strong relationship to the park and church across the street.  The school has been designed with an eye toward sustainability.  The open configuration of the classroom wing lends itself toward bringing both an abundance of natural light and ventilation into the classrooms.  The project utilizes the CHPS scoring system, and has also used the LEED criteria to identify additional sustainable strategies, such as the choice of renewable building materials.

Jurors said this scheme is interesting in terms of a variety of classroom clusters and the way in which the classrooms surround an outdoor learning environment, which is a unique feature that doesn’t occur in many submissions.  The clusters mirrored the existing single-family residential community and they try to provide an environment that works with the community.  The scale of the project versus the scale of the surrounding community is its strength.  It has a nice flow to it.