ARTS & ATHLETICS BUILDING: ST FRANCIS HIGH SCHOOL

The premise for the St. Francis High School Arts and Athletics Building lies in the series of thin, scrim-like surfaces that delineate its exterior, describe its programmatic divisions inside, and define landscaped zones outside.

Rather than seeing thinness as a reductive mandate, the Arts and Athletics Building’s variegated facades and partitions continually aggregate, or maximize, the relationships among programmatic areas, as well as between interior and exterior spaces. Walls, normally thought of as dividers, here create a kind of architectural wilderness, an occupiable thinness that allows the theater, the gym, the art studios, the sports park, the existing YMCA building, and the city to engage one another actively and continuously.

The dual-glazed curtain wall is comprised of two fritted glass surfaces whose overlapping patterns create an array of surface types ranging from transparent to semi-opaque to entirely opaque. To expand the skin’s depth further, curtains, handrails, and landscape elements (living bamboo walls) extend this thickened envelope into the site. Exterior terraces are captured within the façade’s planes; foyers and galleries are visible both in front of and beyond its veil; and circulation and egress routes inhabit its ligaments.

The result is a building whose thinness is filled — imbued with life — through an architecture that fosters, absorbs, and forms the complex resonances of program, urbanism, and materiality.