This 3500 square-foot building includes a new aftercare facility, kitchen, and classroom for Pluralistic School #1, an existing private elementary school in Santa Monica. Sitting between the school’s existing buildings and its athletic fields, the structure unifies the campus with a new circulation system that loops between the classrooms and the open space.

Including flexibly arranged areas for homework, crafts, and cooking, its location adjacent to the basketball court, soccer field, and general play yard assures easy flow between the various interior and exterior activities. Upstairs, the new classroom (with mezzanine), looks west over the fields to catch the ocean breezes and minimize the intrusion of noise from the yards below.

Throughout the project, structure is exposed so that the students can learn from the logic of construction. Generous use of windows and skylights creates a naturally ventilated, luminous environment in which students find it easy to concentrate. The project includes no air conditioning system and uses minimal energy or artificial lighting.

The exterior is clad in plaster and shiplapped cement board. Its joyful pattern draws from the school’s colors and reflects the sense of directed play that occurs both inside and outside its walls.

The challenge posed by the renovation of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories was to create a cohesive, forward-looking image for a world-class science and engineering research department looking to rebrand itself within the larger context of Caltech. The project transformed a historically-protected building designed by Bertram Goodhue in the early 20th century.

The solution involved using the very same concepts that underlie flight itself, specifically the idea of aerodynamic flow, and the way that geometry, form, and material properties create differential pressures that are the source of lift. Applied to space, architectural form, and two-dimensional wall coverings, the result is a series of elements – many hanging at ceiling level – that create dynamic environments as well as refer to the work that is happening in the laboratories and classrooms.  For instance, the pattern of felt in the conference room ceiling is taken from a seminal flow diagram developed at Caltech, while the form of the lobby ceiling was inspired by the premise of how air rushing through it would be altered by its columns and walls, such as in a wind tunnel.