Lick-Wilmerding High School
Technology and Design Center
San Francisco
Pfau Architecture

On this campus, indoor and outdoor spaces commingle in creative ways

© Pfau Architecture

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This independent, preparatory day school serves 380 high school students. As the union of three industrial arts schools founded around 1900, Lick-Wilmerding combines over a century of tradition into an integrated and demanding academic curriculum with a distinctive program in the technical and fine arts.

The school had outgrown its dining, performance, and shop facilities and needed new space. A facility to house the school’s shop program was designed. The central, single-level configuration of the new shop spaces allows them to orient towards one another, defining a shared work area between them and encouraging student interaction. Shops surround an outdoor courtyard, creating a new centralized campus center out of a previously unused field.

A new cafeteria, also at the heart of the campus, creates a positive relationship with both the north courtyard and the new shop core. An informal outdoor eating area is created to the north, allowing students to spill outside for lunch, weather permitting. Inside the large cafeteria offers sweeping views of the shops and hills beyond. An open kitchen extends out into this space providing a permeable buffer between the faculty lounge and cafeteria, and offering cooking as a pedagogy of the school.

The south end of the building is developed as the new music area with improved practice and performance space. The architects expanded the footprint of the theater within the existing building to increase seating from 300 people to 428. Sustainable elements are programmed into the new buildings.

Landscape design and building forms interrelate. Roofs of shops transform into terraced landscapes; a raised portion of the undulating roofscape in front of the cafeteria becomes a place to enjoy the view while catching an outdoor lunch. A new, centralized student terrace links the library, shops, and new theater/classroom lobby together.

Formal name of Project:
Lick-Wilmerding High School Technology and Design Center

Location:
San Francisco

Gross square footage:
34,000 sq ft

Total construction cost:
$12.5 million

Owner:
Lick-Wilmerding High School

Architect:
Pfau Architecture Ltd.
630 Third Street Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94107
415 908-6408 tel
415 908-6409 fax
www.pfauarchitecture.com

Peter Pfau	Dwight Long