The Science and Environmental Center embodies the Nueva School’s mission is to inspire passion for lifelong learning, foster social acuity and environmental citizenship, and develop the child’s imaginative mind, enabling students to learn how to make choices that will benefit the world.
Project Name: Science and Environmental Center at the Nueva School
Studio Name: Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
General contractor: WL Butler
Landscape: CMG Landscape Architecture
Photographer: Bruce Damonte, Richard Barnes
Founded in 1967, the Nueva School is an independent school, with the Hillsborough campus serving over 500 students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade. The 33-acre campus, located in the semi-rural coastal hills of the San Francisco Peninsula, features a thriving coastal live oak woodland ecosystem, a variety of dispersed structures and dramatic views of San Francisco Bay. The Science and Environmental Center is the final phase of earlier Nueva Hillside Learning Complex originally completed in 2008.
“It is important to empower students to nurture the place in which they live and learn: their local neighborhood, regional environment, and global ecosystem. With increased awareness of devasting climate change and acknowledgement of the unsustainability of certain patterns within the human condition, environmental citizenship and the development of this mindset in schools are now core necessities in the educational process.” – Lee Fertig, Head of School
Ecology of Learning
The new Science and Environmental Center supports the school’s evolving mission of sustainability and environmental stewardship as a foundational pillar of student education. The project supports the school’s environmental citizenship program with eight science labs and associated support spaces that bring together pre-kindergarten through eighth grade classes to explore the interconnectedness of humans and the natural environment. Linked indoor and outdoor learning spaces serve as a living lab, where students practice sustainability, conduct environmental and social studies, and debate solutions to a broad range of environmental challenges.
Buildings that Teach
The Science and Environmental Center project teaches environmental stewardship, demonstrating how human interventions can be sensitive to the local environment and support regional ecologies. The project carefully weaves multiple sustainable strategies together, connecting school culture to place, creating education spaces that inspire lifelong learners while showing reverence for the natural world. The building is 100% electric and designed to be net zero operational energy/carbon, producing on-site all the energy it consumes annually. Its narrow floor plate allows for ample daylighting, views and natural ventilation, demonstrating how passive natural systems can reduce our need for energy.
In an era of more frequent and severe droughts, the building promotes advanced water conservation by harvesting rainwater in a 10,000-gallon storage tank for reuse in the building’s toilets, reducing potable water use by 89% compared to the baseline.
The Science and Environmental Center is a threshold building, visually and physically connecting the built campus with the forested regional open space beyond. A “Canopy Walk” links the existing Student Center at the heart of the campus to the new Environmental Center with a universally accessible educational path across the steep site. By using the Canopy Walk, all students—regardless of physical ability—may experience and explore the seasonal rhythms of the restored oak woodland ecology.
Process
In 2012, the Nueva School embarked on an update to their campus masterplan. They held a series of workshops with the Nueva School community, including students, staff, faculty, parents, alumni, and Hillsborough neighbors to identify campus opportunities, constraints, needed facility improvements, and evolving programmatic needs, which included: advance Nueva School’s leadership in environmental education; provide a new home for the school’s re-conceptualized PreK- 8 environmental education program; demonstrate innovative solutions for energy and water conservation on campus; provide for a resilient and regenerative Nueva Community; continue to serve the community and the biosphere; preserve open space on campus by concentrating new construction to areas already impacted; preserve the native ecology of the site by limiting grading, tree removal, and landscape disturbance; and improve Nueva School’s ability to advance educational reform with updated facilities to support conferences, teacher training institutes, after school programs, and summer education programs as the school’s outreach program commits to improving education delivery to students beyond the campus.
