St. Coletta School

Bringing Building Blocks to Life

By Jaime Van Mourik

Blueprints Spring 2007
Volume XXV, No.2

One of the benefits of membership at the National Building Museum is the opportunity to participate in our popular Construction Watch Tours. These behind-the-scenes visits to projects under construction allow participants to learn about the design and building processes from professionals working on site. In many cases, the featured projects would not be accessible to the public after completion.

On May 13, 2006, I joined 19 Museum members for a tour of a new facility for St. Coletta of Greater Washington, a private, non-sectarian, non-profit organization that operates a school and day program for children and adults with mental retardation and autism. The project, designed by Michael Graves & Associates, is located in Southeast Washington, across from RFK Stadium. Our guides were John Fitzgerald, project manager for contractor Whiting Turner; Rebecca Hill, director of development for St. Coletta; and Sharon Raimo, the organization’s executive director. Having studied architecture in college, I personally found the story of this project—from the nature of the design process, to the relationship between architect and client, to the end result—profoundly inspiring.

Following is a transcription of an interview I recently conducted with Michael Graves and Bob Miller, who served as project architect for St. Coletta.

Jaime Van Mourik: Was this your first school design, and if so, why did you decide to compete for a type of project with which you had no prior experience?

Michael Graves: It is common for laypeople to think that experience is one of the primary motivators in choosing an architect. Once you have visited enough schools, and especially schools of this type, you realize there are few experts. An architect who is a humanist at heart will sense not only the task, but also the opportunity to make a contribution, not only to this school type but also to society at large.

In addition to several campus master plans, Michael Graves & Associates [MGA] has designed both general and specialized classrooms and buildings, as well as libraries, museums, athletic facilities, dormitories and cafeterias for many universities. However, this is the first school of this type we designed. When you meet the parents, teachers, and especially the students, you immediately understand why we would so much want to design this school. They deserve a great school.

Van Mourik: During the tour, Sharon Raimo, the executive director of St. Coletta, mentioned that initially she was not convinced that you should be given the commission. That changed after you went down to the existing facility in Alexandria. Could you speak a bit about this experience?

Graves: As I understand it, Sharon was skeptical of all the architects, as I believe she should have been. Those that call themselves experts in the field of designing schools, hospitals, and care facilities are sometimes just working by rote, rather than on the exact task at hand. 

I have had a little time to [inter]act with somebody who has learning deficiencies and disabilities, but nothing like the autism that these kids have. And I wanted to see the difference and when I saw it I was struck by it. I actually had tears in my eyes because I couldn’t imagine anybody’s life like that in the environment they were in at that time. And so it was our responsibility as architects to give them the best that we could. And this wasn’t about getting the job. This was about doing something for society at large and making a paradigm for these schools.

I believe ultimately she knew how strongly I felt about giving these kids the school they so greatly deserved.

Van Mourik: Fifty percent of St. Coletta’s students are non-verbal and suffer from mental retardation and autism. What challenges did you face as an architect for the design of a nontraditional school like this one?

Bob Miller: The St. Coletta School needed to serve a didactic purpose in image, form, color, and plan. The school gave MGA several books to read on the learning processes of children with autism and mental retardation. This was a very important part of the learning process for [us].

An important mission of the school is teaching life skills to the students. An example of the relationship of the architecture to the learning process of the students is the use of color.

We designed the school to be divided into five “houses” that serve each of the five user groups (based on age) of students [as] identified by the school. The “houses” are grouped around a common area called the Village Green. Each of the houses was designed with a single point of entry from the Village Green—in other words, each house has a front door.  Each house has a similar plan layout of a common room (upon entry) bookended by an open classroom to each side and with a teaching kitchen upstairs. But very importantly, each of the houses is color-coded—each house has an identifiable palette of colors that allows the students to identify their “house.” The use of color and patterning further identifies the rooms (i.e., each of the common rooms has an identifiable checkerboard pattern in the themed color of the house) to assist the students in navigating their house. The basic hierarchy of the plan assists in this, as well.

Finally, the primary forms or “blocks” across the north (Independence Avenue) entry façade help the students to identify their school. The primary forms [are] a dual metaphor—they identify the mission of the school, which is to give the students the building blocks for their lives, as well as conveying the more playful image of a school made of the shapes of children’s building blocks.

And I think we tried to pay very close attention to that idea that each of these five houses was a home for the students and at least during the day that they needed to understand how to navigate it and it needed to make sense.

Van Mourik: In your research, was there anything that particularly struck you as you were learning about these types of conditions, and that really informed the design process? 

Graves: One of the advantages I think I had was that two years previous to that, I was asked to give a lecture to some psychiatrists at their annual junket in Spain. So I had to find out what architecture would be like for children with schizophrenia. And a friend of mine had recently finished a school for those kids and what I found was that everything he did was the worst thing that you could do for children with that handicap. And so I was already in tune with some of the same kinds of issues, but I’m always affected by the senses and especially by the sense of touch, as those kids really need to be touched and to be a part of somebody else to give them the kind of security that the kids with schizophrenia [need] as well. So that’s that part, not that it comes naturally; it’s just. . . you had better pay attention to it or you’re going to fail.

Van Mourik: The site for the school sits on the edge of a residential neighborhood across from the RFK Stadium and the D.C. Armory. You were dealing with two different scales on either side of the site. Can you speak about the design of the school as a whole and how it fits into the neighborhood?

Miller: The east façade of school—which contains three of the five “houses”—was designed in both scale and form to relate to the residential neighborhood it borders. The repetition of the mythic image of house forms relates to the repetition of the row houses across 19th Street. The primary forms across the north façade relate to the more monumental scale and form of the District Armory and RFK Stadium beyond.

Van Mourik: Do you think your design for St. Coletta will have an influence on the neighborhood and perhaps the design of future structures?

Miller: The District has substantial plans for the area. We hope and believe that this is the first of many structures along Independence [Avenue] to the [Anacostia] river—this will assist in the revitalization of the area.

Van Mourik: Do you think that this school can also serve as a model for traditional schools?

Graves: I think it can, but I wouldn’t want it to serve as an aesthetic norm because it isn’t. I think if you did a school for elementary kids who were not autistic, they would think we were pandering to them. But for the way it is organized with their various small classrooms off the Village Green, I think that is an extraordinary way [to lay out a school]. I’ve got a young son who’s only four and he talks about the way his school is organized and where he goes every morning, and it gives him a certain comfort level to know that there is repetition in his day. It isn’t that every day has to be different and that teachers make it so that it’s not boring, but he’s normal and therefore he doesn’t suffer the same kind of anxiety that [St. Coletta’s students] do. But their anxieties are hundredfold to his. So you can imagine that kind of repetition off the Village Green and, as you said, the light that comes into it and so on is spectacular. I think those are very important moves and I think they could be used as a kind of norm or paradigm for other schools.

Van Mourik: You have created a “facility that will serve as a national model for the delivery of special education services,” in the words of the St. Coletta School.  What will you take away from this project that may influence your future work?

Graves: One of the issues from the very beginning is one that is prevalent in all designs, especially school designs for a younger audience: the question of how to do something appropriate for them and not patronize them. This is one of the main issues we tried to explore. I also think that the establishment of hierarchy—that is, from the entry, to the Village Green, to the individual houses—was essential to our assumptions and in satisfying our audience.

Miller: This was a very interesting process for our office. We literally started the design process with a box of building blocks (fabricated by our model shop) that defined the basic program. Manipulating this into a meaningful structure and piece of architecture was a long process but a worthwhile one.

One element that is truly rewarding is that we were able to adapt our language and the way we do architecture to help those with special and unique needs to learn and grow. So many students and parents have remarked how extraordinary the building is to them both as a piece of architecture and as a resource for their family. I am glad that we were able to make something so integral to the improvement of their lives.
 

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