Marriott Hall, St. Albans School. The original 1909 school building is seen on the left.
The masonry walls of the new Marriott Hall were designed to match those of the original 1909 school building as much as possible. Since the original quarry was long-closed, the team selected stone—based on a color match—from White Hall, N.Y., in the Adirondack Mountains, and they executed several mock-ups to ensure that the mortar work had the same hand-tooled raking as the original. The design team selected darker stone to act as a sort of wainscoting where the building meets the ground plane, another homage to the original building.
The project includes several green roof strategies. By applying field turf to the roof of an existing pool building (foreground), the architects created an outdoor recreation area directly off the student center. The glass guard rail on top of the cantilevered top story protects another planted green roof, this one with sedum and pavers. The next phase of the project will add a pavilion-like, glass-enclosed conference room to that top-most green roof, for use by faculty or for special events.
The hillside site resulted in a four-floor building that is hidden from view at the main entrance, a single-story volume on the northwest end. The two uppermost floors contain classrooms and offices, and they bridge a pathway before joining the two lower levels at the base of the hill.
Group study spaces, like this one adjacent to the building entrance, are located throughout Marriott Hall. Floor-to-ceiling windows allow students to view the original 1909 school building. Cues such as the terrazzo floor that matches the hallway (unlike the carpeted classrooms) mark the space as a public area.
Fire egress is accommodated by glass-enclosed indoor stairs that run directly alongside an exterior stair, with doors on each landing that allow students free run of the outdoors. "This is not a culture where we want to limit freedom," says Michael Carline, director of capital projects for St. Albans.
