Squeeze Play

New Bronx School Rises on a Playground

By Tom Stabile

It’s not easy for the new school on the block to fit in – especially when it is being built on the playground of an existing school in the middle of a residential city neighborhood. But the project team on Early Childhood Center 361 in the Norwood section of the Bronx not only has found a way to knit the new facility into its tricky location but also is using the odd site’s features to create an urban education anomaly – clear sky sightlines, daylight in basement spaces, corridors filled with natural light, and distinct playgrounds for kids of different ages.

The new 47,685-sq-ft building will soon be a younger sibling to P.S. 94, the vintage New York City school that is sharing its playground, which had previously housed two temporary trailer classrooms and a mini-school structure. While P.S. 94 now hosts pre-kindergarten through the eighth grade, the programming may shift once ECC 361 opens, because N.Y.C. Department of Education guidelines generally call for such facilities to house pre-kindergarten through grade three.

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Site sharing is a necessary approach for the city school system because of a severe land shortage for new construction, says Matthew Blitch, v.p. of Citnalta Construction of Bohemia, N.Y., the project’s general contractor. His firm had built P.S. 228 in Queens on the lot of I.S. 227 several years ago.

“It’s harder and harder for the Department of Education to find usable land in the city because available properties are either prohibitively expensive or have something wrong with them,” he adds.

The new $37 million school, slated to open in September 2010, will have 22 instruction rooms, a cafeteria, library, administrative suite, and multipurpose room across three floors and a basement level. The building – a steel-frame structure with concrete floor slabs – will have capacity of 478 students, says Lawrence Lee, the project manager for the N.Y.C. School Construction Authority, which is acting as the owner on the project.

Fitting In

The project team broke ground last summer, and the early design and construction focus has been on the challenge of adapting the plans to the site and ensuring the effort doesn’t disrupt the educational mission of the existing school.

One hurdle is the significant slope on the site – an 8-ft drop in elevation on the through-block site from Kings College Place, which P.S. 94 fronts, to the E. 211th St. side, which ECC 361 will face. The design team, led by Gran Kriegel Associates of New York, opted for a “split-level” format that allowed the entry lobby to be at grade with the sidewalk and created room for the basement – which houses the cafeteria – to have windows. Typical designs for such schools allow the basements to have no windows at all, but letting natural light flow into to spaces where the children would be was a priority, says David Kriegel, managing principal of the design firm.

The positioning the team on the trapezoid-shaped site chose also allows the windows to face the playground on one side of the building and the landscaped spaces of the Bronx’s massive Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side, Kriegel says. “Having that open view is unusual in an urban school site,” he adds. “They see sky in both directions.”

Excavation and foundation work continued through the winter months on ECC 361, which occupies a tight space in the yard of the neighboring P.S. 94, at left, in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

Another logistical task the site poses is its presence in a neighborhood dotted with low-rise apartment buildings. “The site is slightly tight because there are narrow two-way streets around the school area, so getting into the construction site with trucks for carting away dirt or concrete pours, not to mention the cranes that are going to the steel work, becomes a challenge,” says Alan Senzer, the SCA’s chief project officer on the job.

The project team also is monitoring the impact on P.S. 94, says Craig Collins, senior director for construction at the SCA. A lot of the preparations to minimize disruptions to students took place early on, he adds. “We identify the working hours, and if the school has any major restrictions in terms of noise, types of work, or special testing days, they would let us know ahead of time and we would put that into the documents for the contractor,” Craig says.

Even then, the presence of students is always on the project team’s mind, Citnalta’s Blitch says. “You have to be cognizant that there are children around, whether it’s noise during school hours or the trucks coming in,” he says. “We’re familiar with where there can be problems, such as the smell of the roof materials. We’ve learned to work on loud stuff, like using jackhammers, on days when they’re out.”

The early going has focused on removal of the temporary structures, excavation, and building the foundations, which were nearing completion in January, the SCA’s Collins says. The team had to dig down about 12 ft and remove a retaining wall in the process.

Steel erection was slated to start in February, with a goal to have the structure up by late spring or early summer, the SCA’s Lee says. That will allow masonry work and other exterior panel installation to take place in the months following “to make sure the project is enclosed before next winter,” Lee adds. Interiors and site work would follow through to the end of the project.

The new school has its own water, sewer, gas, cable TV, electric, and storm drainage connections, a process helped along with early cooperation from various utilities, the SCA’s Senzer says. “Con Ed did a lot of underground work already and Verizon relocated existing telephonic cable lines,” he adds. “We’ve gotten point of entry into the new building from all utility companies.”

SUBHED: Multi-Faceted Design

The design focus of the new facility brings together several priorities, from the broader goal of fitting into the neighborhood to delivering on its status as one of the first schools in the city to be designed in compliance with Local Law 86, which delineates green construction requirements. The SCA produced the N.Y.C. Green Schools Guide and Rating System to comport with the law, which essentially provides an equivalent to the LEED rating system’s silver-level criteria.

Access to the site on narrow, two-way residential streets is one of the main logistical challenges on the NYC School Construction Authority’s ECC 361 project, which borders East 211th Street in the Bronx.

The facility gathers “points” to meet the green goals through a variety of features, including the daylight-spreading efforts, Kriegel says. Other sustainable design elements include plans for water-efficient landscaping on site; 10% use of post-consumer recycled materials and 10% use of materials from the local region; the selection of mold-resistant sheetrock throughout the structure; and the use of low-emitting vapor materials in adhesives, paints, and carpets.

Meeting the priority of blending into the neighborhood also entails careful selection of materials, Kriegel says. The exterior uses a brick veneer and window-panel section façade to reflect – in colors, shape, and motif – the themes found in the nearby apartment buildings and the classic “Snyder School” look of P.S. 94, which was one of the many facilities designed by Charles Snyder, chief architect of the city schools between 1891 and 1922.

To blend with – but also enliven – the red-brick apartment buildings as well as P.S. 94’s tan brick detailed in cast stone, the ECC 361 exterior has splashes of bright-colored panels, masonry, and cast stone that plays off of the neighbors. It also echoes the P.S. 94 column bays with a similar scale and rhythm of shapes and materials, Kriegel says. “We tie the two buildings together visually, but we also wanted to break down the long façade facing the street to make it seem less imposing and more friendly,” he adds. “You want it to seem like a place the children will be happy to run into every day.”

The design also applies light touches to make the school practical and welcoming to its future clientele, such as a covered entry area outside of the lobby to provide temporary “parking” for the many strollers that will arrive in the morning – a space that also doubles as an informal social space and protection from the elements, Kriegel says. The double-height lobby itself is also wider to be stroller-friendly, and as the mid-point for the split level design, serves as a central distribution point to get around the building. Kriegel says the lobby will get a site-specific art project installed as part of the city’s longstanding Percent for Art provision that allocates 1% of the budget for city-funded projects for public artwork. The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs administers the art program.

The new school’s exterior will colorfully blend materials such as masonry, cast stone, and window panels to echo the neighboring school and nearby apartment buildings, but also provide a modern face to the community.

Other design elements add flavor to a structure shaped by its site. For instance, the tight dimensions required the building to rise three stories above grade with classrooms loaded on both sides of corridors, so Kriegel’s team tried to make those hallways brighter. The solution was adding small sunlit gathering spaces that are wider and framed by glass at either end of the hallways. “It becomes a social space – a light-filled, un-programmed area with built-in seating,” he adds. “We worked hard to get that into the design because it gives kids a little place to gather but offers sightlines for administrators and teachers to see them.”

On the structural front, the design adds a “floating floor” slab, which is essentially a double floor structure with rubber isolators, to separate the administrative suite in the basement from the multi-purpose gymnasium and auditorium above it. “When you’re driven to do vertical schools, sound travel becomes an issue,” Kriegel says.

And in the academic realm, the design takes into account the school’s programming priority to “mainstream” special-needs children into the general student population through its placement of two elevators and a handicapped elevator, the siting of a special needs classroom on each floor, and other features – many of which grew out of specific requests from the principal. “This is one of the projects where we had a dialogue with the principal through the design process,” Kriegel says. “This is not typical, but it was great to have the principal at the design meetings.”

A last but lasting design element is the careful planning of the remaining playground spaces. The design calls for distinct play areas for the older students from P.S. 94, another area for the younger grades, and a fenced section for the youngest children, each with age-appropriate equipment. It’s a practical approach but also a respectful nod illustrating the new school’s debt to the play yard as its true foundation.

Key Players:

Owner: N.Y.C. School Construction Authority, Queens
Architect: Gran Kriegel Associates, New York
General Contractor: Citnalta Construction, Bohemia, N.Y.
Concrete-Excavation-Foundation: Darcon Construction, Elmont, N.Y.
Electric: Five Star Electric, Queens
Mechanical: Anron Heating & Air Conditioning, North Babylon, N.Y.
Mechanical Design: DVL Consulting Engineers, Hackensack, N.J.
Steel Fabrication: Ocean Steel, New Brunswick, Canada
Steel Erector: Glasmar, Rockville Centre, N.Y.
Plumber: V.C. Vitanza Sons, Brooklyn
Masonry: D’Aprile Mason Contractors, Bellmore, N.Y.