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Special to American School & Hospital Facility
September/October 2008
Planning Ideas to Consider Prior to Construction & Renovation
By Devin Releford
When an 80-year-old private school in Atlanta decided it wanted to upgrade its facilities to meet the needs of today’s students, it hired a team of professionals to not only design, but also to choreograph the complicated strategic master plan. The Lovett School is blessed with its location on 100 acres along the picturesque Chattahoochee River, but that same natural boundary also provided numerous challenges when the school’s board launched a capital campaign to re-engineer its entire campus design. Add to this mix the board’s long-term desire to keep its green-space-to-building-footprint ratio at two-to- one, as well as a number of regulations that now govern development in the river corridor, and you have written a puzzling recipe for the school’s facility managers and its outside design team to follow.
"In addition to sequencing which buildings we were going to move, rebuild and/or renovate, we had to design new ball fields for sports that weren’t even played by Lovett’s students when they first built the school,” said Brad Good, principal of HGOR planners and landscape architects and a member of the project management team. “In the old days, they had a football and a baseball field. But now we had to improve facilities for soccer, lacrosse, and softball, too.”
As water resources have become more important, the design solutions for the school include collecting storm water runoff for use in irrigating the new ball field construction.
Solutions for the new buildings, or even renovations to older ones, were not as easy to come by. Land is at a premium within metro Atlanta and Lovett is locked in not only by the river but also by some of the most upscale residential neighborhoods in the city. So smart building practices for a campus, such as Lovett, require thoughtful planning and minimizing impacts of new development; thus the majority of new buildings are built on the footprints of the old buildings.
So the architectural design team collaborated on a plan to consolidate one of the more impervious elements on campus: parking. “We consolidated a number of the surface parking spaces into a parking deck,” Good said. “That opened up a few pieces on the board for us to begin playing with.”
After the school board determined the hierarchy of needs and set priorities, the design teams began to orchestrate the elaborate game of checkers. An old building was leveled and in its place a new high school was built. When the high school teachers and students moved into their new facility, their old building was renovated to house the lower school. Next, the team got to work on the new lower school building.
When the architects and landscape architects began to consider redevelopment, it was required to reinforce the land area that surrounded the river so that as it changed other areas on campus, it would not negatively affect the riverbank. As a part of the planning process, the landscape architects recommended the school convert a piece of land that had degraded over the years into an ecologically friendly stream garden that was restored and dedicated in honor of a former school headmaster. The landscape architects designed built- in seating areas comprised of local granite so teachers and students could have an outside classroom to learn about nature and the environment.
The Lovett School’s topography contains many hills and valleys that pose a challenge to any free flowing traffic on campus. The topography also limits the surface space on campus for parking, roadways and new construction. The landscape architects designed a parking deck and re-designed the roadways through campus to decrease traffic and increase pedestrian safety on the school grounds. These designs reinforce the function of the campus sports complex and make it easy for pedestrian and vehicular traffic to flow through campus for sports events.
Lovett is exceeding green standards in building its new middle school. The entire building will be a classroom for students, highlighting environmental stewardship and preservation. The facility will feature elements that will involve the student body and make more efficient work for the facility managers. The 75,000 square-foot brick-and-glass building will feature a rooftop garden, a naturally lighted art room with gallery space, technologically advanced classrooms, a multipurpose room with retractable bleachers, a spacious study lounge, and a computer lab.
The new middle school is taking strides to be LEED certified and has an extensive recycling policy. For instance, the building will use waterless urinals, saving thousands of gallons of water each year and built-in recycling bins are placed throughout the school at key areas, such as near printers and in hallways.
The rooftop garden will absorb energy on the school’s roof, reducing utility costs. Solar panels placed on the roof will be used to heat the school’s restroom water. The rooftop garden features drought- tolerant plant life and granite rock taken from locale quarries. Drainage water, combined with condensation from the schools heating and air conditioning system, is collected to water outdoor landscape plants. The channels and collection pools are made from recycled materials.
“One thing about a master plan, you have to come back after you implement each phase and re-evaluate it in light of evolving needs,” Good said. “The major difference in re-developing a school versus a business campus or a city block is that schools have a longer frame of view. The buildings they construct need to serve their constituencies from as long as 25 to 45 years. When you are making decisions on that basis, you have to plan more and take into consideration a lot more facility-management issues than if you were thinking 15 to 25 years out. It is truly a long-term vision.”
Devin Releford is a writer for HGOR.
HGOR is a nationally recognized firm that embraces the challenges of creating places of social value, economic sustainability and environmental stewardship. With a staff of planners, urban designers, landscape architects, environmental specialists and support staff, HGOR focuses on quality service and innovative solutions to complex design issues. For more information, visit www.hgor.com.