Like many academic campuses, the grounds of The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, grew over a century in deliberate, but largely shortsighted, ways. So by 1989, when Philadelphia architect Kieran, Timberlake & Harris (KTH) was engaged to plan a new phase of expansion, the firm found a scattered collection of perfectly respectable, but rather anonymous, Neo-Georgian and 1960s Modern buildings.
by Vernon Mays
Like many academic campuses, the grounds of The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, grew over a century in deliberate, but largely shortsighted, ways. So by 1989, when Philadelphia architect Kieran, Timberlake & Harris (KTH) was engaged to plan a new phase of expansion, the firm found a scattered collection of perfectly respectable, but rather anonymous, Neo-Georgian and 1960s Modern buildings.
Reorganizing the school's upper campus became a primary concern, and the firm's design for the 240-student West Middle School (named for benefactor Al West) emerged as the first tangible step toward giving the ill-defined campus "a new address," explains KTH Principal James Timberlake.
The architect started by clearing the site, replacing a tennis court with a new horseshoe-shaped driveway. The resulting green defines the east campus edge and focuses attention on an old carriage house, slated for renovation as the admissions office. Placing the school beside the entry green also creates a second lawn behind the building for play.
In its form, the new school resembles nothing else on campus, but its palette is sympathetic to the long-lasting materials of other buildings, including slate, metal, brick, and limestone. The architect's decision to design the building as a teaching tool by revealing its tectonics made the selection of exposed, self-finishing materials a natural choice. Paint, caulk, and drywall are minimized.
Moreover, the building extends a pattern of inquiry into the fabric of construction established by KTH in its earlier work, an approach characterized by dividing the program into simple repetitive units, fitting those units into a rational scheme of assemblage, expressing structural elements forthrightly, and developing a compatible but separate language for the infill enclosure.
At Shipley, structural walls appear as brick piers or large expanses of brick where the sides of classroom cells are exposed at the west end of the building. Slate infill walls between the piers are essentially a modified roofing system that satisfies the school's low-maintenance requirements.
The patterning of the slate infill walls, while playful and energetic, is somewhat jarring and difficult to decode. This disparity occurs despite the fact that the staggered gear-tooth openings beside the structural piers resulted from a formal logic. Each classroom is expressed identically on the exterior with a central window and small casements at the corners; the zippered effect occurs where the aligned classroom windows are broken by nonaligned windows at stair landings.
The fundamental unit of the three-story building is the classroom cell, four of which are clustered around a central gathering space on each floor. The 22-foot-by-22-foot cell dimension sets the structural rhythm for the remainder of the building, with large program areas such as the science labs and double-height resource center requiring the width of two cells. The structural grid shifts in the center to create a functional division between the clusters and specialty classrooms inside the building. As urban design, the resulting cranked floor plan accommodates a spreading of the play green to the north and subtle enclosure of the entry green to the south.
Insufficient program to justify a third floor created an opportunity for new expression at the east end of the building, which contains the public entry and administrative offices. Benefiting most was the second-floor music room, an austere but uplifting space whose high ceiling opens into a lantern.
Beyond the architect's motive to teach children about architecture, there was further method behind the strict repetition of the structural bays, the studied simplicity of the lighting, and the organization of the individual classrooms. The clear ordering of the parts and absence of ambiguity is a settling counterpoint to the spirits of middle schoolers, where chaos reigns.
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Credits and Captions from Original Article
Architect: Kieran, Timberlake & Harris, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Scott Wing (project architect); James Timberlake, Stephen Kieran, Samuel Harris, Patreese Martin, John Poros, Richard Blender (design team); Landscape Architect: George Patton; Engineers: French and Parello (structural); Vinokur-Pace Engineering Services (mechanical/electrical/plumbing); Yerkes Associates (civil); Consultant: Tigue Lighting (lighting); General Contractor: Haverstick-Borthwick Company; Cost: Withheld at owner's request; Photographer: Catherine Bogart, except as noted
© 1997– KieranTimberlake Associates LLP
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