JON JERDE

The Jerde Partnership International designed CityWalk and Canal City Hakata in Japan.

Los Angeles is a city without edges. But there is a powerful need in people to come together and feel the restorative enregy provided by a complex communal experience. Our project uses this phenomenon as a model.

Spontaneous communal experience is spatialized, so the high school contributes to L.A.’s evolving urban context by operating both as a school and as an integral part of the communal experience. The public institution is redefined: It is no longer an isolated element in the context of the city, but rather a creator of community. The project is designed to invite rather than exclude, so that the values of today’s culture can be made manifest in its public institutions, broadening the concept of “school” in the process.

This project combines elements of the urban, the architectural and the natural to create a holistic, organic school that offers students an equal focus on mind, body and soul. The high school is designed as two parts--an urban-park block and a classroom zone--that form a whole. The two are connected by a linear street that runs between them. This concourse operates like the quad on a college campus, providing a social and spatial infrastructure.

The urban-park block contains a core of primary resource elements, including a library, a new-media and technology center, a performing-arts center and a cafeteria. These resources, accessible to the public after school hours, are shared by the school and surrounding neighborhood.

A park covers the block like a green carpet, providing a landscaped area for leisure and collective activity. This organic element enhances the student experience, as well as the community nearby, providing an urban park of the kind lacking in Los Angeles. Activities in the park might include concerts, speeches or festivals. (Private funding, corporate sponsorship and the involvement of other city agencies will be needed to integrate this element.) An amphitheater within the park creates a collective heart for the project.

The classroom zone is designed as modular. Because new interactions among technology, teachers, students and information are causing the reexamination of the learning process, classrooms are designed to be organic: flexible and adaptable to change. They are arranged in a series of autonomous clusters, each surrounding a gathering space, or student neighborhood. The clusters can combine, allowing uses to be redefined, based on evolving educational needs.

The classroom zone connects to the urban park block by a series of pedestrian bridges. These provide access from the classrooms to the library and new media and technology areas, as well as to the park level, allowing learning and leisure or athletics to happen simultaneously.*