SEATTLE ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES MIDDLE SCHOOL

LMN ARCHITECTS COMPLETES THE NEW SEATTLE ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

MIDDLE SCHOOL

THE NEW INDEPENDENT SCHOOL BUILDING CREATES A FRONT DOOR FOR STUDENTS, ENHANCES COLLABORATIVE LEARNING, AND FOSTERS COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Seattle, Washington – April 29, 2019 – LMN Architects celebrates the completion of the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School. This project continues the evolution of this urban school and provides a new middle school program configured vertically to leverage the limited site, enhance pedagogical principles, and connect with adjacent school buildings and the neighborhood.

Positioned at the intersection of Union Street and 13th Avenue in Capitol Hill, a densely populated urban neighborhood in Seattle, the new Middle School synthesizes its urban condition and program into a six-story academic volume relating in scale to the mixed-use commercial core along the arterial street, and a lower volume dedicated to athletics that mirrors the residential neighborhood context found along 13th Avenue.

Rob Phillips, Seattle Academy’s Head of School, comments: “What was originally visualized as a collaborative, innovative, dynamic, and student-centric learning space has fully come to life and exceeded our expectations for our middle-school students, teachers, and community.”

Middle School academic spaces occupy the upper floors in the new 51,372 SF building, while the lower floors provide for entry, administration, general gathering, maker space and music instruction. A gymnasium and outdoor rooftop playfield provide much needed physical activity space. Lower floors also incorporate direct connectivity to adjacent Seattle Academy buildings, further underscoring the project’s important function as a campus connector.

Wendy Pautz, Design Partner, comments: “Beyond the programmatic and site complexities, this project reaffirms the important role of schools in the urban context. An innovative approach to stacked program and connectivity between students, classes, grades, the broader school and the community provides an educational experience centered on team-oriented projects and problem-based learning, grounded in the larger context of its neighborhood. We hope this new project contributes to the well-being of the community, the education of its children and the social activity along the Union Street corridor.”

PROJECT Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School

LOCATION1215 E. Union Street Seattle, Washington 98122

CLIENT AND DEVELOPERSeattle Academy of Arts and Sciences

DESIGN YEARS2014-2016

CONSTRUCTION YEARS2017-2018

MAJOR BUILDING MATERIALSPT concrete, structural steel, brick and curtainwall

PROGRAMIndependent secondary school with 12 education classrooms, 3 science laboratories, 3 support classrooms, robotics laboratory, music classroom, meeting spaces 1 per grade, administration offices, counseling offices, admission offices, PE/ Athletics offices and support spaces, common area for lunch, multi-purpose seminar space, and gymnasium

SITE AREA22,084 SF

FLOOR AREA51,372 SF

BUILDING HEIGHT64 FT

NUMBER OF FLOORS5

Each Middle School grade occupies a floor within the building, with classrooms organized around a collaborative learning space to accommodate project-based learning and cross-discipline discovery. These collaboration spaces are designed as a series of double-height, stepped interior volumes that cascade between floors, enhancing visual and physical connectivity within the stacked program and creating opportunities for students to observe, cross paths, interact and engage beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Mark Reddington, Partner-in-Charge, comments: “Classrooms have been conceptualized as independent units of learning that connect with each other, collaboration spaces, other grades and the rest of the school, providing a flexible educational experience. Daylight, natural ventilation and operable windows allow for control of each of the spaces and promotes connection to the world outside of the building. The building’s circulation system provides an equitable experience for all students, with coordinated stair and elevator landings to ensure that students moving through the building in groups always converge at the same destination.”

Brick wraps the two building volumes and is punctuated by expanses of transparency, relating to the collaboration spaces, that cascade down the exterior of the building and resolve into a primary gathering space adjacent to the building entry that anchors the urban intersection. An outdoor space at the entry provides a welcoming gathering place for students and an urban amenity for the community. The façade is a mix of grey- and cream-colored bricks that fade vertically from dark to light, telegraphing the programmatic complexity and interior organization of the project. Multi-colored red sunshades provide playful contrast against the brick backdrop and express the school’s identity on the exterior of the building, with bold graphic elements accentuating the name of the school through simple and prominent typography.

Bold graphic elements continue to project the ethos of the school throughout the interior spaces. Each classroom floor features a different accent color, creating a sense of place and identity for each grade as well as a dynamic wayfinding scheme. A ribbon of faceted panels on the feature walls and ceilings of collaboration spaces weaves through the building, connecting these spaces and providing visual continuity both within the building and into the neighborhood.

ARCHITECTLMN Architects 801 Second Avenue, Suite 501 Seattle, Washington 98104

PROJECT TEAMChris Eidt, AIAMette Greenshields, AIAChelsea HolmanWendy Pautz, FAIAMichael Petersen, Associate AIAOsama Quotah, AIAMark Reddington, FAIALiliane Sabra, Associate AIAJeremy Schoenfeld, AIAMasako WadaMona Zellers, Associate AIA

CIVIL & STRUCTURAL ENGINEERCoughlin Porter Lundeen, Inc.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTSwift Company, LLC

LIGHTING DESIGNdark | light consulting, LLC

MEP ENGINEERPAE Consulting Engineers, Inc.

With the new Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School, LMN Architects aspires to create an enhanced presence for the school in its surrounding urban context while creating both purpose-built and flexible educational spaces that further the school’s capacity to respond to its evolving pedagogy. The firm has designed and built projects for multiple independent schools in the Seattle area, as well as the Foster School of Business Paccar Hall and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and the Lee Center for the Arts at Seattle University.

About LMN ArchitectsSince its founding in 1979, LMN Architects has dedicated its practice to the health and vitality of communities of all scales. Internationally recognized for the planning and design of environments that elevate the social experience, the firm works across a diversity of project typologies, including higher education facilities, science and technology, civic and cultural projects, conference and convention centers, urban mixed-use and transportation.

LMN has successfully completed over 700 projects across North America, including the Voxman Music Building at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa; Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas; Vancouver Convention Centre West in Vancouver, Canada; Sound Transit University of Washington Station in Seattle, Washington; and the new Downtown Seattle Hotel.

Based in Seattle, Washington, LMN Architects is led by partners John Chau, Sam Miller, Walt Niehoff, Wendy Pautz, Mark Reddington, George Shaw, Stephen Van Dyck, and Rafael Viñoly-Menendez. The firm employs 150 talented professionals practicing architecture, interior design, and urban design, and the quality of the work has been recognized with nearly 300 national and international design awards, including the prestigious 2016 National Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

For more information on the work of LMN Architects, please visit lmnarchitects.com

Press contact Edgar AlmaguerCommunications & Media StrategistLMN Architectsealmaguer@lmnarchitects.com+1 (206) 788-4321