For the October issue, we give high marks to a quartet of K-12 school projects that bring exceptional design, including the incorporation of sustainable technologies and advanced materials, to a typology that’s historically been bound to middling scores. They include a large public high school in suburban Nashville, named in honor of a civil rights leader, that’s fused to its idyllic setting through large expanses of glazing and outdoor learning spaces; a STEM building with an exposed mass-timber structure that provides the students of an independent, co-ed day school outside of Dallas with an open and collaborative learning environment; a vertical addition to Marymount School of New York, an all-girls Catholic college preparatory school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, that introduces (long-overdue) state-of-the-art gym, theater, and classroom facilities; and a modest, timber-framed preschool—made possible by legendary tenor Andrea Bocelli—built following a 2016 earthquake that devastated central Italy’s Marche region.

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Rosa O. Valdes STEM + Innovation Center

James Lawson High School

Marymount School

Sforzacosta Preschool