Tour A

2 HSW/LU CEUs

SAAS – Home of the Upper School

Seattle, WA

The new Home of the Upper School is a 5-story academic building for grades 9-12 at the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences. The recent completion of the project unifies this Middle School and Upper School campus on one urban block in Capital Hill, Seattle, and connects the campus buildings through a large inner-block courtyard and gathering space. The new building offers SAAS students a range of coveted innovation spaces—wood shop, metal shop, digital fabrication studio, maker classrooms and music production suites. A series of connected student community spaces step up through all five levels, providing a diversity of environments to connect, engage and decompress, each offering a different scale and style and social opportunity and informal learning.

The largest student commons is supported by a commercial kitchen and server for lunch and events. Three upper levels of classrooms include natural ventilation and abundant daylight, and are interspersed with faculty and administration offices, accommodations, and learning support spaces. The project operates fossil-fuel free, with a high-performance building envelope, rooftop solar arrays, vegetated roofs, bioretention planters, and includes native and indigenous species gardens.

Learning Objectives:

We will share how the new Innovations core curriculum at SAAS informed the building program, and how we developed a mix of hands-on making and digital fabrication shops to support diverse learning styles and curricular goals.
We will share lessons learned from the development of an educational garden, incorporating input from a tribal consultant on indigenous botany and knowledge, and with narrative and interpretive signage around the indigenous food forest and edible plants. We will share our process and outcomes with the group, and how we engaged teachers in the process and for future curricular development.
We will share lessons learned through faculty feedback with manually operated classroom windows vs indicator control lights from the Middle School building design to the Upper School design.
We will discuss strategic adjacencies between classrooms, social spaces, and faculty/admin offices to provide student-owned spaces that can be passively supervised by adults in a non-intrusive manner.

Project Team:
Architect Company of Record: LMN Architects
Landscape Architect: Swift Company
Mechanical & Electrical Engineer: PAE
Structural & Civil Engineer: CPL
Contractor: BNBuilders
Specialized Consultants: Innovations Shop Spaces – Sarah Smith of Sawhorse Revolution and Indigenous Botanist – Valerie Segrest
Owner: Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences

Jackson Elementary School

Everett, WA

The new Jackson Elementary School is a replacement building that sits the highest portion of the site, taking advantage of territorial views towards the Cascade Mountains range. The developable site area for the new building was constrained by public utility easements through the middle of the property, a wetland buffer, mature trees, steep slopes, and the old school building, which remained fully occupied during construction. These conditions led to the design of compact two-story school. The project was multi-phased to keep the existing school in operation. Most of the new building (except the gym and music) was built in the first phase, next to the occupied existing building. Upon completion, the school moved into the new spaces, allowing the old building to be demolished, making room for the construction of the new gym and music spaces as well as the parking and drop off areas.

The compact layout efficiently organizes spaces to create grade level neighborhoods and collaborations zones while also creating a sense of openness in the school. Large graphic walls connect academic and community spaces and highlight the school’s tradition of raising and releasing salmon in a local stream. Large trees that were carefully preserved at the front of the school maintain a friendly connection to the neighborhood while providing a new presence and highly functional facility for the community.

Learning Objectives:

Planning for multi-phased occupied project. Building on an occupied school site has challenges, adding complexities of site constraints such as wetlands, utility easements and steep slopes multiplies these complexities to a 4-dimensional challenge of planning what can occupy the same space over time. As designers, how do we accommodate construction on a limited area while mainlining highly functional academic spaces on the same property?
Explore the use of environmental graphic design to add vibrancy to spaces and tell stories of the school’s traditions.
Identify architectural, landscape, and site strategies that improve physical safety, universal access, and civic presence in a residential community.
Consider how a compact building layout may contribute to the school’s sense of community, collaboration, and ease of visibility.

Project Team:
Architect Company of Record: NAC Architecture
Landscape Architect: Fora Landscape Architects
Mechanical Engineer: Hargis Engineers
Structural Engineer: Coughlin Porter Lundeen
Electrical Engineer: NAC Engineering
Civil Engineer: Jacobsen Consulting Engineers
Contractor: Cornerstone General Contractors
Specialized Consultants: Handbuilt Studio Graphic Design
Owner: Everett School District

Innovative Solutions:
Multi-phase occupied construction, displacement ventilation.

LearningSCAPES 2026 Conference in Seattle, Washington

Venue

Seattle Convention Center
705 Pike Street
Seattle, WA 98101

Dates

November 4-7, 2026

Contact

Email: donna@a4le.org
+1 480.391.0840