Project-In-Design

Award of Honor

Gratts Primary and Early Education Center

Los Angeles Unified School District

Jubany - NAC | Architecture

Gratts Primary Center and Early Education Center seeks to replenish education in one of downtown LA’s desperately lacking dense urban neighborhoods, and strengthen the bond between school and community.  The final design seeks a close bond between the new school site, the new affordable housing with a boy’s and girls’s club directly adjacent to the site, and a public paseo with the surrounding residential context.

The programmatic challenges were to combine both schools’ educational programs in one compact site with separate entrances.  The Early Education Center, located on the south end of the site, will houe 176 preschool students with additional K-2 students during the non-school hours.  The Primary Center, resting above and north, will house 380 K-2 students.  Joint-use spaces, such as the Multi-Purpose Building and upper play yard are designed and sited to spark social optimism and provide a framework upon which students and local residents can build. In order to accommodate all of the programmatic and site constraint challenges, the design concept is a “stacked” scheme that maximizes the site, accessibility, and provides openness with safety and security.  The final design allows for public access to a majority of the school facilities after hours, for use for community meetings, sports events, and public gatherings.  By siting the building to take full advantage of its location, designing integrated building systems, and using environmentally conscious solutions, a “cool roof”, asphalt coated with colors to increase albedo and minimize the heat sink affect found on many school playgrounds, and CMU manufactured locally, the school exceeds the requirements for a CHPS certification.

The Jury said this is a really beautiful project on a tight, steeply sloping urban site that extensively engaged the community in every part of its meaning from community advocacy, to the council district, to the educational community, and to the neighbors.  It really transformed this site into an amazing series of learning spaces for the students. They created an architecture that’s simple, playful, fun and really inviting.  It’s important to note, as well, that through its sustainable design process, part of it was to involve outdoor space to meet the requirements of green roofs, and it also enlarges the amount of outdoor space that they have within the site.  It’s a wonderful urban design that pulls through the interiors, and, even more important as noticed in some of the sketches, is how well thought out it is in creating more visible public space for the students and for the educators.