New K-8 School for KCS

LGA is excited to be working with Knox County Schools on another transformative, state-of-the-art facility. This new K-8 school is the first of its kind in Knox County as it combines a 750-student elementary and a 450-student middle school into one educational facility with an emphasis on the visual and performing arts. The school will replace 3 smaller elementary schools, including a performing arts magnet school, and provide a new middle school for students in that district. The resulting larger school will be able to provide more opportunities and resources to students than any of the smaller schools could provide.

Ideas about this new school started forming at LGA even before the project was awarded when members of our team conducted site visits and attended community meetings aimed at introducing the vision for this school to the Mechanicsville, West View, and Beaumont neighborhoods. It was clear even then that this school would be shaped inside and out by design drivers that included the complexities of the site and the school’s unique program.

LGA knew that the school’s design should respond to those design drivers in such a way that the long-term experience of the school for students, staff, visitors, and neighbors would be a positive one. The design drivers include:

• The long, linear, site with required setbacks and height restrictions drives the massing to be a long, skinny building with careful placement of large volumes like gymnasiums and auditoriums. The length of the resulting building also drives the use of a multi-story configuration to minimize walking distances within the school.
• 100’+ of existing elevation change over the length of the site with a flatter area at the top at the former football field drives the use of sloped slabs and retaining walls to efficiently arrange the building’s usable area up the sloped terrain across the 3 levels.
• Existing utilities and other site features drive the use of Maryland Avenue for service access and Vermont Avenue for public entry.
• Optimal solar orientation on the site to maximize access to natural light and minimize solar heat gain drives the orientation of classroom wings and the locations of exterior glazing.
• Views of the mountains and downtown Knoxville drive the placement and orientation of the main entrance and media center to capture those views.
• Clear wayfinding, volume of queuing, and separation of car, bus, service, and visitor vehicular routes drive the use of Vermont Avenue for car drop off/ pick up and visitor parking, while Maryland Avenue is utilized for service access and bus drop off/ pick up.
• The volume of required parking for the 800-seat competition gymnasium and 600-seat auditorium drives the locations of those spaces and the bulk of the parking areas at the top of the site  with a lower slope, allowing easier access between parking and the front door.
• The location of the optimal outdoor play areas drives the location of the elementary school at the bottom of the site.
• K-8, integrated arts program requiring some separate spaces and some shared core spaces drives the main 4-part organization of the school: Grades K-5, shared core spaces, grades 6-8, and the integrated arts wing.
• The large range of student ages drives the strategic separation and selective overlap between students in different grade levels as well as clear placemaking and sense of progression for the middle school.
• The integrated arts programming drives the location of the integrated arts wing at the front of the school, its slight rotated orientation, and its contrasting materiality and massing to celebrate it and emphasize what makes this school unique. The integrated arts wing has access to the backstage of the auditorium at the lower level and access to an outdoor arts patio in the lower level courtyard. The larger performing arts flex space is located at the end of the wing where its main facade is visible from the street and where it has access to controlled exterior space for potential outdoor performance or practice.
• Fitting building to site, the auditorium is additionally utilized to negotiate the sloping site to minimize use of retaining walls.
• The location of the school in a neighborhood of small houses drives the use of various materials, glazing, and smaller volumes to break down the massing to a smaller scale.
• The natural slope of the existing site drives the location of stormwater detention at the lower open portions of the site that do not interfere with the other components of the school.