Completion Date: August 2010

Owner: Natrona County School District 1

Program: A two-story, 55,597-square-foot public elementary school with a prekindergarten. The project includes classrooms, small group rooms, administration and teacher offices, a media center, a music room, a "creativity studio" for art and science instruction, and a central commons that doubles as a community center after hours.

Design Concept and Solution: Inspired by Casper's topography and its historical role as a crossroads during westward expansion, the architects conceived the school as a small village. They imagined the central commons as a kind of enclosed piazza with three classroom wings spinning off from the center. Each wing of the steel-frame, concrete-slab structure is clad with brick in a striated pattern; darker stripes at the base transition to lighter lines at the top to mimic layers of sedimentary rock. The central pavilion has a green metal panel roof, echoing the profile of the nearby Laramie Mountains, with a brick and metal spire that suggests a bell tower marking the center of a village. For the classrooms, the school wanted the flexibility to group students differently for different lessons, not just according to age. Each wing serves as a "learning house" for one age range with three or four teachers per house, who group students according to their needs. Reusing the hub-and-spoke pattern of the building itself, the architects organized each learning house as a central common space lined with classrooms, small group rooms, and glassed-in teacher workrooms. They softened the acoustics of the large spaces with carpet and chose a palette of warm wood with pops of color—each house has its own color scheme—with wood veneer furniture on rollers to make rearranging the classrooms easy.

Total construction cost:  $14.5 million

Architect:
Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership
7 W 22nd St # 10
New York, NY 10010-5140
Phone: (212) 989-2624
Fax (212) 727-1702