K-12

Defining project goals with community members, teachers, students, and operations staff results in outstanding educational buildings that reflect each district’s values.

Our expertise has been honed on working with school districts, charter schools, and private academies, ranging from pre-K to high school, and across all size buildings. We collaborate on teams with school facilities to incorporate unique strategies that vary depending on the goals of the project. Various approaches have included driving down energy usage with innovative mechanical and electrical systems, improving learning environments through optimizing indoor air quality, and investing in architectural features to decrease the complexity and size of mechanical loads.

Our team defines the goals and executes the strategy with our human-centered design approach. The overall goal is that each individual school works best for building occupants and the staff in charge of maintenance and operations.

Indoor environmental quality is fundamental to a learning environment. But that shouldn’t come at the expense of increased energy usage. For example, optimizing ventilation rates for increased cognitive function can occur in a school with a very low carbon footprint. Our expertise regarding health in the built environment allows us to deliver quality assurance services that are tuned to the project’s Vision. We can help identify critical targets for the indoor environment that impact student health and learning, as well as teacher productivity and decreased sick days, such as soundscapes, air quality, biophilia, and circadian lighting.