Ellis/Browning has AIA prize for charter school

By: Paul Weideman
Published online: Sunday, January 01, 2012
Appeared in: Home, Santa Fe Real Estate Guide
Edition: January 2012 Vol. 14 No. 10

An “extraordinary response to the combination of school program and landscape.” That’s what a jury of architects called the Academy for Technology and the Classics, designed by Ellis/Browning Architects, Ltd.

The 7-12 charter school facility, completed in August 2007, won a Merit Award from the American Institute of Architects, Santa Fe Chapter. The awards were announced in early December.

Joe Browning was allied with the academy as it searched for a permanent site and finally brought the ATC into a bricks-and-mortar school. “The charter school started out at the National Guard and after 9/11 they had to leave,” Browning recently told Home over coffee. “They found a site near Genoveva Chavez Community Center and they set up a portable-classroom school. I met them there in about 2003 and they were determined to build a campus.

“What they did first was find an architect. I volunteered with a group of ambitious parents and teachers who had little funding, but they knew I was the architect on Monte del Sol Charter School. The site we ended up with was free from Rancho Viejo. It’s across from the Institute of American Indian Arts campus, a great school, so it’s a compatible neighborhood.”

When he began working with the public charter school on a campus design, there were about 250 students. The built plan is 14 classrooms. “The charter school vision is for a small classroom size and more individual rapport between students and teachers,” Browning said. “Mathematics and the classics of literature are important parts of the curriculum.”

The price tag for the sitework, installation of infrastructure, and building construction was $4,776,000. Future expansion won’t be a problem, at least from a real- estate standpoint, because it’s a 10-acre site.

As explained in an Ellis/Browning concept statement, the school echoes the form of ancient settlements in New Mexico, with its north side bermed into a natural draw in the earth and its two-story, south-facing arc sheltering assembly, sport, greenhouse, and other outdoor activities. Berming makes use of the naturally insulating earth to minimize temperature extremes.

“It’s a very simple-looking design, but there was an attempt to be part of the land on that grand, beautiful site,” Browning said.

The firm maximized daylighting and passive-ventilation systems to cut energy use. Several of the other green values in the 26,570-square-foot school are recycled-content steel framing; a reflective “cool roof ”; efficient lighting; roof rainwater catchment and pumice-wick irrigation; and permeable-surface parking areas.

The approved design included an assembly space that would also have provided additional physical-education space, but there was no budget for that. Browning said school officials and parents are talking about building an outdoor amphitheater, and adding solar collectors, down the road.

Browning and his partner, Lisette Ellis, are now busy with an activity that might seem unusual for an architecture firm: tearing buildings down.

“We’re doing demolition work on the old Bruns Hospital at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design,” he said. “The state owns the site and is hoping to develop it.”

But why architects?

“Well, with a big demolition project like this, you have to plan and bid, and also a big component now is recycling, so we have a waste management plan. I think we’re recycling 75 percent of the wood, metal and concrete. This is more than a dozen buildings, about 80,000 square feet, and we’re documenting everything for the State Historic Preservation Office.”