Project Description
From the AIA:
Discovery Elementary School is the largest zero-energy school in the US. The challenge was to integrate a 98,000 SF building into a residential neighborhood while keeping the entire PV array on the roof. By terracing the mass into a south facing hill, the project met local goals for scale, community goals for preservation of flat, open space for recreation, and global goals for ideal orientation for solar generation. Discovery offers a positive example of a solution to the global crisis of climate change – and along the way emboldens students with the expectation that they are creative participants in those solutions.
2017 AIA COTE Top Ten Jury Comments:
This project sets a new standard for public schools to achieve net zero energy in a challenging climate and makes excellent design decisions that reduce energy through daylighting and site integration. The building section responds to the slope of the site and provides views and connection to the outside for all classrooms. In addition to being one of the few net zero energy schools in the United States, the project also demonstrated rainwater harvesting and rain gardens while making significant water savings. This project gives students the opportunity to enjoy hands-on learning around energy efficiency and generation.
BY THE NUMBERS:
Predicted lighting power density (watts per square-foot): 0.55 watts/sq.ft.
Actual Consumed Energy Use Intensity (Site EUI): 16.2
Actual percent reduction from National Average EUI for Building Type: 76%
Predicted annual consumption of potable water for all uses, including process water: 737 gallons per FTE (527.24 kGal total annual use)
Percentage of rainwater that can be managed onsite: 19.2%
Percentage (by weight) of construction waste diverted from landfill: 90.54%
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
Discovery Elementary School is Arlington Public Schools’ first elementary school designed in the 21st century. While built to address rapidly growing student enrollment in Arlington, the school was designed to meet a larger goal – to prove what can truly be achieved with a new public school facility. To this end, careful attention was focused on designing and building a school that supports how and where students learn. Every nook and cranny of the school is arranged to create a seamless integration between design, sustainability, and learning. Recognizing that students are the creators of our collective future, Discovery Elementary sets the stage for the development of the skills necessary for long-term stewardship of our world.
The school was designed to be a “net zero energy” building, meaning that the amount of energy produced annually by on-site renewable energy sources is equal to the amount of energy used annually. Discovery is anticipated to become the first net zero energy school in the Mid-Atlantic and the largest in the United States. As a carbon neutral producer of clean energy, the school offers a positive example of a solution to a global crisis – and along the way emboldens students with the expectation that they are creative participants in those solutions.
Nestled near the nation’s capital, Arlington County is one of the fastest growing counties in Virginia. As such, the need for contextual sensitivity with the rapidly urbanizing neighborhood and adaptability for after-hours use were top concerns. The school shares the site with an existing middle school and has been master planned for future middle school expansion. Open, programmable space is preserved as much as possible by situating a full third of the building’s footprint on existing slopes. The school tiers into an existing hill to minimize the perception of its size while featuring exterior materials that are residential in nature and scale. Pre-K and Kindergarten students are grouped into three “kinderhouses” that mimic the size and spacing of adjacent homes.
To support ownership of the new school, the mascot, colors and school name were chosen by a vote of the student body. The “Discovery Explorers” name reflects the forward-looking, inquiry-based learning that takes place in the building. The school name also serves as a tribute to John Glenn, who lived adjacent to the site when he became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. In 1998, while still a sitting senator, Glenn returned to space as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery, becoming the oldest person to fly in space.
The school’s design takes advantage of the topography of the site to create distinct, tiered academic zones and separate exterior play spaces for early childhood, primary, and elementary grade levels. Discovery’s public spaces are defined by a large roof canopy with a cedar soffit that runs the length of the school and serves as the school’s “front porch.” At the main entry, the roof extends out as a canopy with an oculus, which allows the entry plaza to serve as a large solar calendar that indicates both time of day and time of year.
Light is celebrated in multiple ways throughout the school, culminating in a rooftop solar lab that allows students to conduct real time and on-going experiments. Data from these experiments can be tracked and graphed using a building dashboard system accessible on any device in the school. The street side of the school is accented with warm colors – reflecting their south-facing solar orientation. On the north side, the school uses playful arrangements of cool colors, such as greens and blues, echoing the natural expression of moss that grows on the north side of trees.
The school’s wayfinding goes beyond basic navigation to support a larger vision of spatial organization that reflects each grade’s expanding curriculum and identity. As students progress through the school, their “world expands” – with the first floor themed around animals found in earth eco-systems and the second floor themed around the elements of the sky and heavens. Students start out as Backyard Adventurers in Kindergarten and finish Fifth Grade
as Galaxy Voyagers. This storyline is graphically communicated along an entry wall highlighting each Explorer grade level. On the first day of school, Explorers are able to “make their mark” in their expanding world by signing their name on the wall – and follow along as the mark moves down the wall over their six year journey at Discovery.
Discovery Elementary inspires students and teachers to use the building creatively to facilitate everyday learning and lifelong exploration. To support engagement at every scale, the school features an extensive array of exterior playscapes and interior furniture including stools, bean bags, benches, height-adjustable tables and chairs, reading steps, and even a two-story slide – all of which encourage creative expression and student choice.
Inside classrooms, flexible details such as foldable partitions, retractable garage doors, and various furniture offerings support teacher collaboration and cross-pollination. Throughout the school, one-to-one technology enables research and collaboration
to happen anytime, anywhere. Dry erase and magnetic creativity walls encourage student expression and ownership; Scrabble and Lego walls fuel linguistic and spatial exploration; and the “Hedge” (which encloses and defines the Kindergarten “Backyard”) provides nooks and crannies that buzz with activity before, during, and after school.
With a reconfigurable range of learning spaces, the positive correlation between learning, high performance architecture, and student engagement continues to find expression in all types of unanticipated ways – demonstrating that Discovery should continue to provide meaningful settings for educational practices that are always evolving.