November 13, 2006

click image to view larger Image © Norman McGrath

If one is going to create an architecture-themed high school from scratch, then it follows that the building itself could become a chief teaching tool.

The notion seems romantic, but behold Arquitectonica’s massive, muscular profile for New York’s High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture. Opened this fall on the site of an old brush factory in Ozone Park, Queens, the 150,000-square-foot structure has five simple, but educative skins. Each marks a different function: pre-cast concrete clads the auditorium; painted steel for the library and corrugated steel for the construction and carpentry lab; glass block for the entrance; and schoolhouse red brick for the three-story volume containing classrooms, which cantilevers out to rest atop an equally cheeky slanted concrete column.

Essentially, it’s a materials study right there on the sidewalk. And it picks up again in the double-height lobby-cum-gallery, where various exterior cladding pierces the front wall and to define the program of boxy volumes inside. (In a flourish that is more college than secondary school, this entry also contains three of artist James Casebere’s moody oversize photographs of architectural models.)

From nearly anywhere you stand, the jutting and nesting boxes arranged along the elbow of the L-shaped classroom “bar” is easy to read. “It’s like a teaching library of possibilities,” firm principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia says.

Using the physical structure this way was important, precisely because the school isn’t the first of its kind. The School Construction Authority and architect of record STV wanted the new building to stand out from similar programs in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Manhattan, when they tapped the Miami firm. They measured some astonishment when students began scrutinizing their new environment—and giving visitors guided architectural tours. Fort-Brescia, though, isn’t surprised they felt a connection: “Schools are generally classic brick with catalogue details. This one has edges that are emerging and raw—the restless energy of adolescence.”

Kelly Beamon

ADVERTISEMENT