“Who are you?” asked a Machias Elementary School first grader as she ran out of her classroom on the way to recess and spotted out-of-place adults. “We're the architects who designed your school,” said Matt Rumbaugh, the project manager and design principal with NAC Architecture's Seattle office. The girl stopped. Her eyes widened. “Ooooooh.” She seemed impressed. Then, after a pause: “Why did you guys have to change the playground?”
This was the only complaint heard on a recent tour of the K–6 school in Snohomish, Washington. “Visiting our beautiful school?” was the more common phrase from teachers. Most students showed, rather than voiced, their appreciation: cavorting on the playground in T-shirts despite the rain, or curling up with books on beanbag chairs that threatened to swallow the smallest of them. Like the new Marysville Getchell High School, Machias is about an hour north of Seattle—the two are a 15-minute drive from one another, but in different districts. And like Marysville's predecessor, the previous 1970 Machias building was at capacity and out of date. Instead of renovating, the district built a new school on the same property, which opened a year ago. (Riverview, another elementary school nearby, was also demolished and rebuilt on its site with a design by NAC.)
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