An expansion and renovation of an existing 1920’s Public School Building, PS 50Q serves 910 students in grades Pre-Kindergarten through fifth and special education students. The design responds to the school system’s mission of welcoming and assimilating first-generation citizens and their parents, as most of the community comprises immigrant families from diverse locales.

Located in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, the five-story school sits on a triangular-shaped lot surrounded by mature trees with a shared school and community playground on the eastern half.

With the planned addition equivalent in size to the original school, several locations for the new building were considered. The selected scheme provided a compact, multi-story expansion, connected by a series of bridge-like passageways to every level of the original building, minimizing its encroachment on the site. The new structure coils tightly around the original T-shaped school, preserving the existing playground and an allée of 70-year-old London Plane trees, reimagined as the forecourt approach to the new central entrance.

The renovation offered an opportunity to rethink the ‘front door” of the school and simplify circulation by creating a new, and transparent, common entrance for all students that leads them, according to their grade, to different parts of the building. The compact, “high-rise” plan, while unusual by the standards of typical American Schools, continues to develop a New York City tradition attuned to growing densities.