Often architects, given the opportunity to expand and renovate a building, leave their own signature in the most obvious way—up front. Watch out for the splashy new entrance, a blockbuster lobby, and a grand stair.
But Andrew Bartle of ABA Studio in New York faced a challenge more than an opportunity with his addition to St. Luke’s School in New York’s Greenwich Village. A few years ago, the private institution came to the architect to expand its K–8 facility, which sits in a complex containing St. Luke in the Fields, a Federal-style brick Episcopal church (1822). In addition to the two-story brick school built in 1955, an attached gymnasium, originally used by the church and dating to 1929, would be part of the renovation. A small, single-story classroom pavilion with a white curvilinear roof, which Barry Rice Architects appended to one end of the school in 2010, would remain. The L-shaped school itself is pushed into the northwest corner of the block-long site where it occupies its own quiet precinct, with the main entrance facing an interior garden rather than the street. The clients and the architects decided to keep the entrance where it was, discreetly away from the busy city: students enter a gate next to the church and meander through the leafy enclave to get to class.
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