Project Details
- Project Name
- Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School
- Location
-
Raleigh ,North Carolina
- Client/Owner
- Wake County Public School System
- Project Types
- Education
- Project Scope
- Renovation/Remodel
- Size
- 6,000 sq. feet
- Year Completed
- 2020
- Shared by
- Andrea Timpano
- Project Status
- Built
This project was selected as a Merit winner in ARCHITECT's 2023 Architecture & Interiors Awards, Interiors: Lobby and Amenity Space category.
"It’s so simple and elegant and such a great solution for an interior area. It’s hard to get the simple things right and they nailed this.” — Juror Tima Bell, Assoc. AIA
Perhaps no place in America is more redolent of a certain kind of nostalgia than the narrow school hallway, its walls decked with varsity pennants and tacked-up leaflets, that runs the 50-odd feet between the attendance office and the water fountains. For Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School in North Carolina, this often overlooked bit of educational infrastructure has finally gotten its due, courtesy of hometown firm Katherine Hogan Architects and its transformation of the institution’s once-drab entryway into a sparkling Great Hall.
The main site of the designers’ intervention: an enormous staircase, descending in stages to the lower concourse, formerly sided with crude metal banisters and housing a cluttered, ad hoc storage space in its zigzagged undercroft. Recognizing an opportunity, the team refit the inner flank of the staircase with translucent panels, up-lit with concealed lighting that gives students a perfect, TikTok-ready bit of scenography for swanning downward to the lower level; when they get there, their friends can cheer them from the ample wooden seating that now clusters around the foot of the steps and fills the once-empty space beneath. For those encumbered by painful memories of late arrivals in a dim, cinder-blocked enclosure, KHA’s project makes it hard not to grumble about those spoiled kids today.
PROJECT CREDITS
Project: Southeast Raleigh Magnet HS Great Hall
Architect: Katherine Hogan Architects, Raleigh, N.C. Katherine Hogan, AIA (principal); Vincent Petrarca, AIA
Structural Engineer: Kaydos Daniels Engineers
Electrical Engineer: PDC Engineers
General Contractor: Varnedoe Construction
MATERIALS AND SOURCES
Paints and Finishes: Sherwin Williams
Wallcoverings: McNichols Perforated Metal