Los Angeles
Morphosis

Morphosis forcefully generates a sense of identity for the Science Center School in L.A.’s Exposition Park

	Photo ©Tom Bonner

By Suzanne Stephens

The realization that a thrusting, steel-framed, lattice-laden structure attached to an early-20th-century brick-and-cast-stone armory is actually a public elementary school comes as a shock. It’s such a far cry from the drab, low-rise, concrete-block buildings usually pushed through by school districts. The discovery that one of this country’s most aggressively original architects, Thom Mayne, FAIA, of Morphosis, designed the Los Angeles school only intensifies the surprise. Mayne has brought a sui generis architecture consistently to the public sector. If a bold and brash large-scale work, such as the Science Center School, almost overwhelms its diminutive (in height) student body, few would hold that against him: The school, for 690 K-12 students, along with a teacher-training center, brings a unique energy to a dismal building type.

While the Science Center School is part of the L.A. Unified School District (L.A.U.S.D.) system, its unusual program places it in another category altogether. With a core concentration of science, math, and technology, the charter elementary school has joined up with the California Science Center’s professional educational training and community outreach program (the Amgen Center for Science Learning) in operating the facility.

The renovation of the 120,000-square-foot armory (now named the Wallis Annenberg Building for Science Learning and Innovation), for which Kaplan Chen Kaplan Architects acted as preservation consultants, proved daunting. The team of architects needed virtually to strip the armory to its shell for an event and exhibition hall, plus install eight elementary school classrooms along with a commons room, labs, a library, and various teacher-training facilities. After removing the main hall’s first floor, the team built a boatlike structure on the new floor slab above the parking level. It contains multipurpose spaces within its prowlike form, while supporting a lush, 8,400-square-foot bamboo garden on its top deck. Just to the north of the historic building, Morphosis designed a new two-story, bar-shaped structure linked via bridges to the armory. The steel-framed, 34,000-square-foot wing contains 20 classrooms, four in a group, clustered around five common rooms reserved for scientific experiments. A long rampway paralleling the wing takes students down to the playground or to the armory, where another above-grade longitudinal bar, the lunch garden, is attached to its north edge.

The architecture of the new wing draws on Morphosis’s signature lexicon of steel lattices, bar buildings, bridges, and berms. Here Mayne pushed the linear structure upward toward the east so that his gridded lattices, bridges, and stair extensions jaggedly protrude above the intersection of Exposition Boulevard and Figueroa Street.

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the People Architect  Morphosis Architects www.morphosis.net/ Principal: Thom Mayne Project Manager: Paul Gonzales Project Manager: Daynard Tullis Project Architect: Mario Cipresso, Selwyn Ting Project Architect: Kristina Loock Project Designer: Silvia Kuhle, Jean Oei, Dave Grant, Scott Lee, David Rindlaub, Patrick Tighe, Brandon Welling, Eui-Sung Yi, Josh Coggeshell, Tim Christ, Fabian Kremkus Project Team: John Enright, Jerome Daksiewicz, Martin Josst, Devin McConkey, Jose Valeros, Josh Sherman, Ben Damron, Simon Demeuse, Henriette Bar, Tarek Qaddumi, Sandrine Wellens, Eric Nulman General Contractor Bernards Brothers Jeff Bernards www.bernards.com Structural Engineer Englekirk and Sabol Consulting Engineers Bill Wallace, Pete Hatalsky www.englekirk.com/ MEP Donn C. Gilmore Associates, Mike Gilmore, Rob Grant Specifications CMS Consultants www.cmsconsultants.com Hardware Consultant Brownell Associates Mike Brownell Civil Engineer Cali Land Kevin Lai Kitchen Dewco Landscape Architect Katherine Spitz Associates Katherine Spitz www.katherinespitzassociates.com/ Cost Estimator Davis Langdon Adamson Rick Lloyd Exposition Park Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Master Planning Brian Glover www.zgf.com/ Historic Preservation Kaplan Chen Kaplan, David Kaplan www.kckarchitects.com/

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