Beaver Country Day School Research + Design Center

A nontraditional library addition brings research, fabrication, and study space to middle and high schoolers outside Boston.

Tell me about the Beaver Country Day School campus. What was your design responding to?
Katherine Faulkner, AIA, principal-in-charge: The campus has been added to maybe four times since the 1920s. The structure that we were focusing on was a 1960s concrete-frame library, which really sticks out as a modern Brutalist building in a field of iterative Georgian additions. The school had done a master plan, called “the ring of knowledge,” that was all about bringing their campus up to accessible standards, and that was very much the genesis of this project: How do we line up and connect all of the buildings so that one person can get to every corner of the campus without going outside? The school has also really made a name for itself among middle and high schools that have embraced technology. This addition was going to be a library, but one rebranded into a research and design center. It’s got a strong fabrication component, and its notion of how a library is used is really quite different from any library addition we’ve ever done.

Nader Tehrani, design principal: There is a connection between the physical distribution of spaces in the addition and pedagogical model the school is working with. They eliminated what you would traditionally call the front door to the library and the insularity of a reading room, and the new ring that connects the auditorium wing, the arts wing, the fabrication wing, and the science wing flows around a courtyard. Essentially the library as we would know it has been exploded around this ring in its entirety and encompassed that continuity of space. The library is seen as a lively space where people come to learn how to do their work, to collaborate, and to make things.

Tell me about the character of the spaces you designed.
Tehrani: We added one floor at the very top of the existing library structure, and the rest of the project is about carving out existing conditions and elongating them because of the way it wraps around the courtyard. Spatial typologies that would otherwise be cut up into rooms were attenuated into these long stringy conditions of stairs and ramps. Along that journey you get study carrels and bleachers, and things like that.

Faulkner: The great thing about this client and their method of teaching is the idea that you can take these spaces along the path and program them so that there are small and medium rooms for meeting, and larger classroom spaces—all occurring along what is essentially a ramp that allows an accessible route. The school’s idea of precedent for the space was looking at how people are working these days. What are the kinds of spaces where people go when you are not in the classroom, or on the ballfield, or in the lunchroom? Where is the space that you go to do your project work or to meet with your teacher?

At the center of it all is the courtyard. How did you approach the design for that space?
Tehrani: The courtyard was a collaboration with landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand, and there was an intended dialogue between a bosque of birch trees that he had conceived of in the courtyard and the façades. We went through many different iterations of timber cladding elements—they became thinner, and thinner, and then they became louvers. You’re seeing one iteration out of several that we drew in order to accentuate the kind of dynamism of the circulation as you walk around this building in different directions, but also the way the birch trees wave in the wind.

Faulkner: It’s a funny space, that courtyard, because they always had it. It wasn’t fully enclosed, but it was this really charming space that existed between the buildings with no obvious way to get to it. As we began to develop the architecture around it and this circulation, which would constantly have you confronting it—either coming down the gallery stairs as you look north or looking south from the fabrication space, it became clear how central it would be.

What was your materials strategy for the interior?
Faulkner: The interior is very bare because, certainly for the first-floor fabrication level, the idea is that it’s a workshop. We used Baltic birch plywood upstairs, and we spent a lot of time with [acoustical engineer] Acentech aurally modeling the space, figuring out what could be hard and reverberative, what needed to be soft and absorptive. Our palate always tends toward the natural because you can do a lot with that.

Tehrani: Schools are like public spaces. They’re designed to get beaten up and battered, and our general philosophy toward concrete, fabrics, and plywood is that they’re going to get a lot of wear and tear. The plywood is well-crafted, but it’s a raw detail, and it doesn’t matter if it gets beaten up a little bit because it adds to its patina. Overall, this project also became an exercise about articulating and framing a didactic space of teaching and learning with certain details that trigger in the students’ minds that something in architecture is happening here. It’s not business as usual.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Project Credits
Project: Beaver Research + Design Center, Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Client: Beaver Country Day School
Architect/Interior Designer: NADAAA, Boston . Katherine Faulkner, AIA (principal-in-charge); Nader Tehrani (design principal); Arthur Chang, AIA (project manager); Gretchen Neeley (project coordinator); Jin Kyu Lee, Thomas Tait, Tim Wong, AIA (project team)
M/E/P Engineer: AGA Consulting Engineers
Structural Engineer: Souza, True and Partners
Civil Engineer: Nitsch Engineering
Geotechnical Engineer: McPhail Associates
General Contractor: Erland Construction
Landscape Architect: Reed Hilderbrand Associates
Lighting Designer: LAM Partners
Envelope Consultant: Studio NYL MAAB
Updates Contractor: C&L General Contractors
Acoustical/A/V/I.T. Engineer: Acentech
Owner’s Representative: Ron Axelrod
Accessibility/Code Consultant: Hastings Consulting
Signage: Whitney Veigas
Size: 39,700 square feet
Cost: Withheld