This charter high school houses 500 students in Silver Lake, a multi-cultural community adjacent to downtown Los Angeles. It is the third project in a series of four that the firm has designed for the charter school client. The schools were launched by a nonprofit community development corporation to provide small, focused schools for children in a dense and under-served urban Los Angeles neighborhood. In 2000 and 2003 the office completed an elementary and a middle school on a single block campus in MacArthur Park.

Because of the intense urban conditions of the site it was crucial to recover pieces of urban space and create an educational haven without isolating the school from the neighborhood. In the process of developing a form for the 30,000 square foot, 18 classroom building and keeping within the budget, we created a pair of two-story structures that meet at the prow of the site. A long, winding classroom building buffers the social spaces from Silverlake Boulevard, and a shorter building containing all the administrative offices and media rooms anchors the primary pedestrian entrance.

The courtyard has become the hub of the school; large pivot doors from the art rooms open directly onto the yard for large-scale art projects and bi-monthly all-school meetings. The street edge of both the classroom building and administration wing is clad in a perforated corrugated metal to dampen sound and provide sun control.