Redesign Your School Athletic Pavilion | 2014 National High School Architecture Competition #164
|Advanced Technologies Academy, like many other Blue Ribbon Award winning magnet schools, is renowned for its rigorous academic track and award winning alumni. Along with a great amount of advanced classes and material, A-TECH offers a wide variety of courses focused on future education and technology. Students are faced with a number of various academic challenges and are pushed the breaking point with rigorous amount of school work and extra-curricular activities. Students, from this, learn to be intuitive and hardworking; characteristics needed to become successful later on throughout their adult lives. These elements make up the character of the school itself and make it the award winning school it is.
Design Problem: The school being as award-worthy as it is lacks the proper consideration and attentiveness to the student’s social and physical lives outside of school. Due to the school’s strict focus on academics and education, A-TECH tends to lack the amount of proper care toward physical education and fitness. Students are required to take two years of physical education; however it hardly addresses the importance of continued healthy habits and routines. Along with a weak physical education program, A-TECH has no sports teams or clubs. Students wanting to be a part of sports are required to do them at their home school or elsewhere. A-TECH severely lacks the amount of proper devotion towards physical health. Students are not pushed to strive towards being physically fit and are developing unhealthy habits as a result. Along with the proper devotion towards physical health, A-TECH lacks a friendly environment that gives the students a place to express themselves or develop skills other than in academics. The school’s design and overall feel gives the students the sense that they are in a hospital rather than a school itself. With the bleak shades of color, stark white lights, and hand sanitizing stations at every corner, students feel like they are going into the E.R. rather than English class.
Design Solution: In order to create a fun, light, environment worthy of a healthy lifestyle, I plan on creating an athletic pavilion that incorporates each student’s interests as well as expanding on the school’s rigorous academics. Students will be offered a variety of activities that were not present before such as: proper track lanes to run on, a proper indoor basketball court, a variety of sports fields, a proper gymnasium for working out, and a variety of classrooms to educate students about healthy lifestyles. Locker rooms will be available and large enough to incorporate the increasing amount of attending students. In the end, students will no longer have a limited school environment, but a healthy, fun, and overall ecstatic place to express themselves and grow, not only physically, but as an individual.