Camino Nuevo High School

Daly Genik transforms an awkward and almost unusable site in a gritty section of the city into a dynamic environment for learning.

By Sam Lubell

Where else but in Los Angeles would you expect to find a parcel of land that is essentially a large traffic island used as a site for a school? That is exactly the sort of site selected by the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy for its 500-student high school, opened last fall in historic Filipinotown. The complex sits on a long and narrow strip of land in the shadow of U.S. 101 and bounded by four busy streets. Given these frenetic surroundings, and the odd shape of the site, the architect’s challenge was “to find recoverable pieces of urban space” without isolating the school from the neighborhood, says Kevin Daly, AIA, partner of Santa Monica-based Daly Genik Architects.

Pueblo Nuevo Development, a non-profit community development corporation, launched the academy in 2000. It serves children who live primarily in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city. Daly’s firm had already designed the academy’s elementary and middle schools and is now working on a pre-school.

For the high school, the architect was required to fit a 30,000-square-foot building that included 18 classrooms, a media center, and administration areas, onto just over an acre of land. In addition, they needed to provide space for outdoor activities and parking, all while staying within a tight budget below $300 per square foot.

The firm addressed these demands by designing a pair of two-story structures. Along the site’s southern edge, a long building with a snake-like plan, houses classrooms. To the north side is a smaller building devoted primarily to administrative functions.
Continuous corrugated metal panels clad the buildings’ concrete block bearing walls. On the primary street elevations, the panels cover the windows but are perforated to limit penetration of street sounds and provide sun control, but allow views out. The facades curve, breaking up the buildings’ bulk and mimicking the automobile movement around the school.

These facades are painted yellow and grey in a pattern that uses more yellow where the walls push outward and less where they are concave, to emphasize their curves. In some places the south facade pulls away from the lot line, providing spaces for landscaping. To the west, the second floor projects out on columns, creating a sheltered area for students to wait for rides home. Classrooms open directly onto a courtyard between the two buildings, making this space the school’s hub.

Formal name of project: Camino Nuevo High School

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Gross square footage: 29,495 sq.ft.

Completion Date: Nov. 2006

Total construction cost: $13,000,000

Owner: Pueblo Nuevo Development

Architect:
Daly Genik
1558-C Tenth Street
Santa Monica, CA  90401
t. 310 656 3180
f. 310 656 3183
dalygenik.com/

 

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