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Where else but in Los Angeles would you expect to find a parcel of land that is essentially a large traffic island used as a site for a school? Exactly such a site was selected by the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy for its 500-student high school, opened last fall in Historic Filipinotown. The complex sits on a long, narrow strip of land in the shadow of U.S. 101 and bounded by four busy streets. Given these frenetic surroundings, and the odd shape of the site, the architects' challenge was "to find recoverable pieces of urban space" without isolating the school from the neighborhood, says Kevin Daly, AIA, partner of Santa Monica-based Daly Genik Architects.
The academy was launched in 2000 by Pueblo Nuevo Development, a nonprofit community development corporation. It primarily serves children who live in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city. Daly's firm had already designed the academy's elementary and middle schools [RECORD, February 2001, page 134, and March 2003, page 144], and is now working on a preschool.
Program
For the high school, the architects were required to fit a 30,000-square-foot building that included 18 classrooms, a media center, and administration areas onto just over an acre of land. In addition, they needed to provide space for outdoor activities and parking, all while staying within a tight budget of less than $300 per square foot.
Solution
The firm addressed these demands by designing a pair of two-story structures. Along the site's southern edge, a long building with a snakelike plan houses classrooms. To the north side is a smaller building devoted primarily to administrative functions.
Continuous corrugated-metal panels clad the buildings' concrete-block bearing walls. On the...