BY LARA WARREN

OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST YEAR, fenced-off lots and new construction sites have been popping up all over Los Angeles. Bulldozers raze empty buildings, and mixing trucks are hard at work pouring concrete beneath large signs touting new public schools.

Perhaps somewhere else, in another city, this wouldn’t be so significant. But these are the first public schools to be built in L.A. in 40 years. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is currently in the midst of a multi-million-dollar school construction project that will house 200,000 students — a project that is, indeed, quite significant.

Over the past several decades, Los Angeles County schools have become more and more crowded. To address the problem, LAUSD is building 80 new schools, 60 additions and 19 playgrounds. Yet these new schools will be different from the public schools of the past.

The demographics of Los Angeles necessitate a new and modern approach to the task of building schools. The cookie cutter public school model is outdated. The new schools will be not only functional, but will serve as centers of their communities, and their designs reflect that function. No two schools look the same, and each design mirrors and complements its neighborhood.

In addition to the expected classrooms, cafeterias and gyms, there are plans for community-shared parks, pools and meeting facilities. To fully utilize scarce available space, some schools are being built several stories high, others are building parking lots underground, and still others are building rooftop playgrounds.

The Crisis of Overcrowding
“In Los Angeles County, some 16,000 kids a day get bused out of their neighborhood to somebody else’s neighborhood because there simply isn’t enough room for them in their local school,” says LAUSD Chief Facilities Executive Jim McConnell. Every school year, 330,000 of LAUSD’s 750,000 students attend school on an abbreviated year of 163 days — as opposed to the standard 180 days — because of acute overcrowding.

“There is a correlation between the days you spend in a classroom, the quality of the facility and the overcrowding of the classroom to a student’s performance,” McConnell says. “And that’s the crisis we’re trying to address. Those of us who are doing it believe that we’re involved in a true social imperative that is important to the economic and social future of Los Angeles. I think it’s nothing less than that.”

LAUSD’s mission is to build new, quality schools and to make their existing school facilities better, safer and more conducive to learning. The district is currently engaged in two phases of construction. The first phase is a $3.6 billion project which will create 80 new schools, 60 major school additions and 19 playgrounds, delivering some 78,000 much-needed school seats for students. The entire project will be under construction by mid-2004 and is expected to be completed in 2008. The second phase, costing some $1.6 billion, is the result of the 2002 passage of Measure K, a $3.35 billion bond used to create classroom space for 749,000 and providing another 25 or so schools. Phase II construction will begin in 2005 and should be completed by 2009.

“If we succeed wildly — and we have every intention of doing so — we will still need to build another 40 schools after that to overcome the 200,000 seat deficit that has accumulated in Los Angeles County over the past four or five decades,” McConnell says.

The Chance to Dream
“All state of California schools have basically the same budget, the same programs, the same parameters, so it’s only the architecture that can change,” says UCLA architecture and urban design professor Thom Mayne. His award-winning architecture firm, Morphosis, has been in charge of the design of the new Science Center School, a 192,000-square-foot public elementary school adjacent to the Amgen Center for Science Learning. Both facilities are located just south of downtown Los Angeles in historic Exposition Park, home to a variety of museums and cultural attractions. Nearly 850 students are expected to attend the $24.3 million kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school, opening this fall.

“We wanted to make a building that participated in the thought process of what people even thought schools were,” Mayne explains. “There seems to be such a negative image of public schools — sometimes rightfully so — in terms of their typological connection. You think of chain link fences and prisons; very austere, controlled environments.”

Mayne’s mission was to create a facility that promoted the curiosity and the inquisitiveness of children in a safe, stimulating learning environment. The school is the result of an unusual partnership between Los Angeles Unified School District and the California Science Center.

“It will be one of the first schools in the country that will be symbiotic,” Mayne says. “It glues itself to another institution, the science museum in this case, and it forms a middle ground: the Amgen Center for Science Learning.” The school is not a magnet school, but will focus on math and science, incorporating a curriculum of language arts, social studies and fine arts. The California Science Center will assist in the development of science and math curriculum, while LAUSD will oversee the school as a dependent charter school.

“It’s a really, really interesting idea,” Mayne says of the symbiotic relationship between the school and science center. “I believe that its will become a national prototype.”

Part of the school and the entire science learning center will reside in a historic brick armory building, with the remaining portion of the school housed adjacent in a new building. A focal part of the school is the courtyard’s 5,000-foot bamboo garden based on Ma, the Japanese idea of silence. “We wanted to make a place where a young person, in the middle of the city, could just disappear in a piece of forest,” he explains.

Because of its urban location, security was an important issue in the design of the school. Mayne says that their goal was to sublimate the security aspects, so landscaping has been used to secure the campus rather than barbed wire fences.

“When a child is there, there will be no sense of [security fences] at all,” Mayne says. “You’re completely behind these landscape barriers, protected, and that whole issue goes away. They can concentrate on learning instead.”

A Symbiotic Relationship
Architect Rebecca Binder M.Arch. ’75 is currently working on the new Orthopaedic Hospital Medical Magnet High School for LAUSD. Although construction just began in July, it is slated to be completed and open to students by September. The school will be located near downtown Los Angeles adjacent to Orthopaedic Hospital, the largest privately endowed orthopaedic specialty hospital in the western U.S.

Magnet schools were originally created to offer programs in specific fields of study. The Medical Magnet High School will offer a specialized curriculum focusing on medicine and health care. The courses will allow students to explore various careers and professions related to the medical field while preparing for college, from technicians to nurses to doctors and specialists. The 90,000-square-foot school is sited on 4.27 acres and includes 32 classrooms, a library, cafeteria, science labs and administrative offices. The school is designed to create a campus that, according to LAUSD, “carves its own quiet environment from the central city, allowing students a safe and accommodating place of study adjacent to Orthopaedic Hospital’s park-like campus.”

Binder calls the neighborhood around the campus a microcosm of institutions. “We designed the school in the same materials as the new outpatient medical center on the hospital campus, but with different textures and colors,” she explains. “The high school design comprises two buildings connected by an arcade and an expansive wall covered in green vines — it’s generally graffiti-proof.” She says that the idea behind the school’s design is to keep the edifice demure, to not stand out as “brand spanking new” but rather to emulate the neighborhood buildings, blending in and enhancing the area. Binder’s firm, R.L. Binder FAIA Architecture and Planning, was already working with Orthopaedic Hospital when she noticed a “ragtag group of rundown buildings” beside the hospital and realized that they could be transformed into an attached school, similar to the King-Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science.

“We saw a wonderful symbiotic opportunity there,” Binder said. “So I took the idea to Lynn Roberts at LAUSD. She met with [Orthopaedic Hospital president, CEO and medical director] Dr. James Luck and myself, and agreed that this was a great opportunity.”

Every year, tens of thousands of Los Angeles students are turned away from LAUSD’s magnet school programs because of limited class space. The Orthopaedic Hospital Medical Magnet High School will offer more spots — and significantly more opportunities. The hospital has pledged to award 150 internships a year to the students and to lend the school use of its auditorium. The high school will use the athletics fields of the adjacent Trade Tech Community College.

“It’s such a wonderful resource for the area,” Binder says. “The neighborhood parents come to meetings to see when they can sign their kids up for the school. It’s very exciting.” Binder says that a majority of the projects that her firm designs are educational, with an emphasis on projects for institutions of higher education. She and her firm redesigned and remodeled UCLA’s Ackerman Student Union in the late 1990s. Being a secondary public education facility, this project was quite different from projects she usually undertakes.

“Durability is paramount,” she explains. “And, in the case of secondary schools, there are certain guidelines to follow.” There must be a place for students to arrive, an attendance office for students to check in, an ability to secure the campus, classrooms with appropriate support spaces, a nurse’s office, a police office and parking for students, staff and visitors, among other requirements.

“This is a mini-high school, but it requires all the elements of a full-sized high school,” Binder says. “For instance, you can’t have a half-sized library just because the school’s campus is half-sized.”

Old School, New School
LAUSD’s goal to position schools as community centers is not a new one. There was a time when schools were regularly constructed to serve as community focal points, says Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning.

“In the 1920s we had the development of the neighborhood idea,” Loukaitou-Sideris explains. “The school was always placed at the center of the community — very symbolically but also practically — because the idea was that schools were community institutions, that kids should walk to school, and that schools would be more than educational institutions, but also would serve as places where the community would come together.”

She says that the development of the suburban campuses distanced schools from the community, and the schools became self-contained. In the last 20 or so years, she explains, schools were no longer treated as assets of the community but instead as nuisances because of added traffic, constant noise and other such issues.

“So we see the school starting as an institution which is at the center of the community, becoming an institution which is a nuisance to the community,” she says. As schools became more crowded, and Los Angeles realized the need for more schools in the inner city, a new model was needed. They could no longer use the suburban model, which required huge expanses of land that are neither available nor financially viable in the inner city.

“You start really seeing the need to rethink the school and go back to its origins, which is the center of the community,” she says, “and start trying to see how the schools can be modernly used.” There are many issues that make this task much more difficult than it sounds.

“I think this creates an interesting challenge — even architecturally — and I hope LAUSD will live up to the expectations of bringing the school back into the community,” Loukaitou-Sideris says.

That is precisely what LAUSD plans to do. The project is creating 240 acres of playing fields and green space in a densely populated city. “Our vision at LAUSD is that our schools will be centers of their community,” says McConnell. “They will incorporate the best features of sustainable design — energy conservation, environmental sensitivity, natural lighting, low-emitting material — and that they will provide facilities to the community, like auditoriums, meeting facilities, playing fields and green space that, when not needed by the school, will be available for community use.”

School of Dreams
The execution of this huge project by LAUSD is underway without any major setbacks. “Every project has some component of environmental and energy sensitive design,” McConnell says. “While we’re doing that, we’re also cleaning up the environment. For every acre that we build on, we have to mitigate the environmental conditions of that land. Already we’ve removed 31,000 cubic yards of polluted materials from our neighborhoods, so we’re also yielding a cleaner neighborhood. So we think this is pretty important to the future of L.A.”

McConnell says that the medical magnet school and the science center school represent another feature of the LAUSD program, where they enter into joint programs. “In the case of the Orthopaedic Hospital Medical Magnet High School, we’ll have joint educational and training programs, and share recreational and meeting facilities with the hospital,” he says. “And the science center is just going to be amazing. It’s going to be unparalleled, I think, in the country in terms of its ability to teach elementary kids science. Not to mention that the Thom Mayne design is pretty cutting-edge.”

McConnell, as well as the rest of the LAUSD team, are excited about the district’s current and future undertakings. “As I sit here in my office building,” Mayne says as he looks out the window, “I can see the new cathedral right up Grand Avenue, and I can see Disney Hall. I can see Staples Center from the other side of the building. I was at the Getty Center the other day. They are all such fantastic facilities. But by building these new schools, we’ll change the face of Los Angeles in an even greater way — we’ll have an even more profound impact on the future social and economic fabric of this city.

“These are definitely exciting times.”

UCLAlumni Magazine, February 2004