The beauty of limitations

Design constraints are not always a bad thing. In the case of Flora Arca Mata Elementary School, they resulted in a beautiful and non-traditional new school for the neighborhood. The issues? Timing: the school district needed the new school designed and built within two years. Size: the property was only about sixty percent the size of an ideal school site. And location: an existing facility was situated on the site and the neighborhood homeowners’ association had strict CC&Rs within which our design team had to work. Our solutions: reused the site by replacing the existing building with modular structures for all but the multipurpose building to speed construction, designed a two-story classroom building to make good use of the site, held several meetings with the HOA that resulted in a school whose materials and aesthetics blend in perfectly with the residential neighborhood.