To the editor:
Our small town has long worked to find agreement on how to best support and configure our K-8 school. Last spring, we selected the L3 option, which sustained the central campus and set a budget of $93.9 million. Since then, wonderful, balanced work has brought to reality a model school and a new community campus about two fields in a central common for Lincoln. Now we can all see its promise. Like all good design, here are the outline of attributes which invite description.
First, the L-shaped scheme of the school unifies the school facility, and the campus plan will be fulfilled when the community center is completed along with new pedestrian links to the east connected to the Reed Gym. At last, a new unity is promised.
Importantly, what was a linkage between two separate buildings Smith and Brooks is now connected—unified, not just linked.
A new central entry allows for security control and a principal portal reached across an east courtyard. Anchoring these necessities just inside the entry is a new communal learning space, library learning center, and school administration. One is drawn together. One is centered, secured, and welcomed. All in a facility which also allows for varying configurations of team and individual learning.
This attribute of individual and group learning characterizes a new method of teaching. The new plan’s order is interwoven into the frame of the renovated building as third- through eighth-grade classrooms have flexible hub spaces which allow for large group spaces, or work spaces for smaller-scale learning groups to pursue learning independently or with supervision. This is all possible due to new fire separation technology, which allows traditional hallways to be reconnected with smoke-activated door security into useful learning hubs as gateways to classrooms. The end of a hallway may now be encircled by classrooms and that circulation space can be enclosed as part of the hub.
So now we have a design which promises not just a new facility, but one specifically formed to support new educational learning configurations, allowing flexible options for instruction while sustaining and renovating the distinctive spaces of the historic Smith and Brooks schools.
Note that the Donaldson auditorium serving our critical town governance and the beautiful multifunction Smith gym enlarge our school over a conventional K-8 facility. We benefit. Here again there is distinction. The design team and the SBC have worked diligently to create a new fabric for our school. It is a model for building renovation, designing a perimeter envelope which will be the first Massachusetts school where the renovation will achieve net-zero energy conservation, with the best of modern glazing, sun shading, interior illumination, sound and air quality control, and acoustic dampening. Now we benefit from a better building.
As we face a world vitalized by the challenge of lifelong learning, all generations of our small community have a great potential at hand, which is to graciously support the new school’s design’s distinctive design attributes. This is a new space and place that supports ideals we’re investing in for the future.
Sincerely,
F. Douglas Adams, AIA
Historic Commission liaison to the School Building Committee
Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published.
Leave a Reply