Loading...
FREDERICK, MD
The Oakdale Middle School Addition is a one story, twelve-classroom and two science lab addition, designed to integrate fully with the existing middle school building. The alignment offers simplicity of circulation, visibility for supervision and safety, while offering the ability to compartmentalize the building addition for security and life safety incidents. To integrate with the existing building, the design’s footprint retains natural light and views into the existing art room windows by developing an outdoor learning environment. The outdoor plaza can be shared by the art program, new science classrooms, and the pro-posed 21st century learning collaboration area as an outdoor learning environment. The addition continues the design philosophy of the existing school by arranging all learning spaces at the perimeter around a central support spine. All learning spaces will have access to natural light and views. The central support spine is anchored at each end by a Collaborative Learning Area (CLA) intended to offer learners a variety of group sizes and learning activities. Comingled with circulation to maximize efficiency, the CLAs offer two distinct learning environments. Both CLAs are adjacent intervention rooms offering flexible small group learning environments in a more enclosed, intimate, acoustically controlled setting. The arrangement offers a variety of flexible learning environments from large classrooms which can be arranged to promote a variety of learning groups and styles, open collaboration areas promoting the entire facility as a learning environment, outdoor learning for special activities and projects, as well as small private instructional support spaces in an integrated plan with adjacencies arranged to support one another.
