NEIL M. DENARI

Neil M. Denari, the director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, is now designing the Arlington Museum of Art in Arlington, Texas.

For at least 50 years, schools have followed two basic patterns: a campus plan, with individual disciplines spread out over a field; or a megastructure, with one building containing all functions and areas of study compressed together. We are proposing a merger of the two, to create a new form for an urban high school.

This building would “teach” students about two of the most pressing problems of our time: an ecologically sustainable future and the development of the world-city, the presumed culprit in the continuing eco-crisis. To help students understand ways that architecture can create a strong and responsive urbanism fully integrated with nature, our scheme attempts to be both dense and open: Light, air, landscape and sound interact with the interiors and roofscapes of the building itself. Neither campus plan nor fully internalized megastructure, the scheme does not capitulate to suburban Arcadia or shopping-mall claustrophobia.

The site is organized into 50-foot-wide alternating bands of classrooms and garden spaces. These three-story spaces form an organized intersection between hard and soft landscapes, each negotiated by students through ramps, bridges and elevators.

At the periphery of this field are four major areas of function that do not correspond to the scale of the alternating bands. The auditorium, gymnasium, library and urban museum (a suggested new function) are not simply appendages to the site but can be seen as “mutations” within the building’s overall continuum.

What forms out of this is a roofscape that is an extension of the city, an accessible urban garden with panoramic views. This stacking up of function suggests both an ecology of verticality (a critique of sprawl) and an ecology of the green landscape that is as artificial as the building. This approach to building in the city might be called “landscape urbanism,” a strategy for creating a supple, interactive environment. *

Design: Neil M. Denari, Angus Schoenberger.