Bunche Middle School
Work completed at Cooper Carry
The original 100,000 s.f. Bunche Middle School was designed in 1977 with triangular classrooms that had minimal natural light. Important spaces such as the Media Center were located in windowless environments and spaces such as the auditorium and cafeteria were grossly undersized. The new school design will address all these issues to create a new environment for children and teachers.
The site will be revised to accommodate a new track, football field and softball field. With these new programmed spaces many trees were removed from the site necessitating the replacement, on site, of over 3,500 caliper inches of trees per code. The concept of how to accommodate all these trees was two fold. First, the trees have been placed on a grid, reacting to the architecture of the building, with single species of trees at each line of the grid. This is used as an educational tool, as each row amplifies the latent qualities of each tree type through its juxtaposition against the rows on either side. Second is the parabola. Each row becomes a progressively smaller species until the row hits a low point with species such as Dogwood and Redbud, then continues back to the larger tree types such a White Oak or Tulip Poplar. With this design concept we were able to place all the needed caliper inches on site.
