Redesign Your School Athletic Pavilion | 2014 National High School Architecture Competition #132
|Advanced Technologies Academy, or ATECH for short, is a public magnet school that specializes in integrating technology into classrooms to maximize and enrich the learning environment of the attending students. Opened as a school apart of Clark County in 1994, ATECH did not have nearly as many students as there are today in the year of 2014. With no athletic teams or programs, there was no need to have a gym the same size as other regular high schools. With the fact that there was one class added each year starting from 1994, the first class to graduate was in 1997. It was not until the year of 2000 that a small gym was built on the equally small campus ATECH had to work with. With the increase of students every year, the Student Activity Center and the East Wing of the school was built in 2002 in order to accommodate for the amount of students enrolled at ATECH. Now in the year of 2014 there over 1000 students on campus and enrolled for the various program areas ATECH specializes in while using technology to further enhance the learning experience.
With the growing emphasis of athleticism to help fight against obesity, being able to redesign the gym into an athletic pavilion would be one step further to help prevent obesity in the youth today. The small gym that is currently on campus, built in 2000, was only built to accommodate students that year. Fourteen years later, there many more students that still use the gym, and not very comfortably either. The use of space and arrangement of outdoor and indoor spaces have almost no relation or correlation at all. There is a big grass field in between the gym and the basketball and tennis courts. Not only that, but the grass area is not used to its maximum possible potential either. Being able to add on, redesign, and/or demolish the gym to improve the quality of life for current and incoming students would create a greater environment at school and help in the fight against obesity in youths.
There are multiple possibilities in which can improve the way the gym is laid out. Most importantly, I want to be able to add more space to the gym so that the majority of the school can fit into the gym comfortably, with emphasis on the word comfortable. Most assemblies and events that take place in the current gym are usually cramped and tight, with little or no natural lighting that comes from outside. These simple things can help create a better gym for the student body.