Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences

FF&P’s collaboration with Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences began as an extended conversation about the role of science education in secondary school. Through open brainstorming sessions with students, alumni, faculty, staff, and leadership, together we envisioned the school’s new science building as an interactive tool that would reinvent the way science is taught.

Anchoring the southern end of an eclectic urban campus built up around a beloved Alley, the Science Education and Research Facility is an architectural dialogue between rational thought and creative expression. A simple concrete and glass building housing the classrooms and labs contrasts with a tower-like special projects pavilion with walls resembling rammed earth. During construction, students selected shells, fossils, and other locally-sourced natural objects to embed into the façade’s stratified layers of concrete.
To infuse the new building with the Alley’s “see and be seen” personality, we pushed all vertical and horizontal circulation to the exterior. Wide balcony walkways feature pockets of social space filled with colorful lounge seating, tables, and work-walls made from recycled chalkboards. In keeping with Crossroads’ progressive values, we also designed the building’s restrooms to be all-gender, equally accessible to everyone.
In and around the new facility, landscaping doubles as a laboratory. Rooftop garden habitats have become rest stops for migrating monarch butterflies, offering safe harbor for the species right in the middle of the city. The building’s new front plaza is planted with native flora such as purple coneflower and English lavender, a lesson in local botany.
Inside the classrooms, modular tables, rolling desk chairs, and soft cushions allow students to move around and vary their working styles. Glass-walled laboratories keep indoor work spaces connected to the world outside.
An important part of Crossroads’ science curriculum is encouraging students to play an active role in taking care of the planet. In addition to new science building’s LEED Gold rating, many of its sustainability-minded architectural elements and building systems are plainly visible so they can be identified as teaching elements. Photovoltaic cells embedded in the south and west facades’ glass curtain walls provide solar power for the building, which uses both LED and natural lighting. Other sustainable features include a stormwater retention and filtration system, as well as recycled insulation. These give students a healthier place to learn, as well as promote environmental awareness and stewardship.
Well-known for its arts program, Crossroads embraced our suggestion to include instructional art in the new science building. Ceramic tiles outside the bathrooms illustrate the human body’s molecular structure. We also worked with artist Ned Kahn to incorporate an original rooftop sculpture—a hyperbolic paraboloid onto which hinged aluminum panels are suspended. These create beautiful patterns and shadows that are a direct reflection of the blowing wind.