Bringing the school to the sidewalk

At HomeTown, a 300-acre new urban development being built by Arcadia Realty in North Richland Hills, Texas, the Walker Creek Elementary School has been designed so that it forms a street wall and helps define an important corner in what will be a mixed-use town center. In keeping with the design standards of HomeTown and a charrette led by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, the school’s classrooms occupy two-story structures that border the sidewalks and are close to the streets.
“We wanted the school to be engaged with its environment — not sitting in the middle of an ill-defined site, behind parking lots or lawn,” explains Mark Vander Voort of the Dallas-based architectural firm HKS, which designed the school. “It’s an L-shaped building that sits right on its property line. That’s hardly ever done; most suburban schools have a big pickup and drop-off area” in front.
    Sidewalks in front of HomeTown’s 700-student school are 15 feet wide, with street trees planted along them for shade. “The streets are narrow — 22 to 24 feet wide, with no extra turn lanes,” Vander Voort notes. There is on-street parking for teachers, visitors, and others. (The 10-acre school property also contains a parking lot.) He describes the school as being made up of “a family of smaller buildings, to help modulate the townscape.”
Although many children walk to the school, which opened in the fall of 2005, arrivals by vehicle also had to be accommodated. Consequently, Vander Voort provided a paved drop-off lane on the interior side of the school property. He calls it “the patio” because although cars and buses can drive on it when gates are opened, the gates are closed during much of the day, converting the pavement into a play area. “It also serves as a fire lane, which is required for all schools,” he adds.
The school, offering pre-kindergarten through grade 5, will eventually be part of a center containing live/work units, light commercial, and public buildings such as a recreation center, civic center, and library. The municipality is using tax-increment financing to help pay for civic buildings. Bill Gietema, CEO of Arcadia, has projected that at build-out, HomeTown will have approximately 1,400 homes.
Birdville Independent School District, which operates the school, nine miles northeast of downtown Fort Worth, is having HKS apply the L-shaped “semi-urban” building design concept to two other sites. “In one case, the school will be on a busy commercial street, and the new building will act as a buffer, protecting the backside,” Vander Voort says.