At Nueva School’s pre-K through 8th-grade campus, in Hillsborough, California, even the buildings are fodder for learning. Most recently, students have been analyzing the sustainability strategies of the new Science and Environmental Center (SEC), completed in 2021 by the San Francisco firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (LMSA). It’s the latest in a series of projects by LMSA for this independent school’s hilly, wooded 33-acre compound. Joining forces since 2004—on works including a library, classroom structure, revised master plan, and student center/cafeteria—Nueva and LMSA have set increasingly ambitious goals for energy performance and carbon reduction. The 11,600-square-foot SEC building is so efficient that, in warmer seasons, it produces more energy than it uses to operate. Still, “it doesn’t hit you over the head with its technological feats,” says LMSA principal William Leddy. “In our view, the poetics and experience of place—the way daylight moves, casting shadows through leafy canopies or slatted screens—are just as important as technical aspects in achieving sustainability.”

Deferring to the existing undulant terrain, with its coastal live oaks and olive grove, LMSA has built along a hillside and a ridge overlooking San Francisco Bay. The meandering campus occupies land once owned by banker William Willard Crocker, whose mansion, a 1931 Italianate villa, now houses the lower school. (Founded in 1967, with an ongoing focus on intellectually curious, high-aptitude learners, Nueva added a separate, LMSA-designed high school campus in 2014, in nearby San Mateo.) The emphasis on imaginative indoor-outdoor learning and respectful stewardship of the planet are reflected in the architecture. For example, LMSA’s 2007 student center/cafeteria offers—beneath a planted roof—a large, flexible multipurpose space, with a wide south-facing garage door that opens to a dining terrace and landscape-embedded amphitheater. In addition to the new SEC, this most recent phase expanded the student center and its kitchen, bumping out the structure’s bowed north elevation to include a long, arcing balcony with panoramic bay views. Between the two buildings, LMSA created a “Canopy Walkway” amid the trees. Elevated on piers (and fully ADA compliant), it recalls boardwalks on stilts that weave gently through rainforests, barely touching the land.