Project Description
As one of the first public elementary schools in the city, Garfield Elementary School has been providing a rich academic environment for local children for more than 100 years. Today, Garfield is a small, tight-knit community serving 240 children of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds in grades K-5. The building is a four-story stepped building perched on Telegraph Hill below the historic Coit Tower in San Francisco. The site’s rich history included Union Primary School, built around 1868, which was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake in the same location. The school, as we found it, was designed in the 1970s by Esherick Homesey Dodge and Davis Architects in a different location on the site. This plan had design features that were not conducive to current education methods. This included open classroom spaces with circulation through them, connected with accordion doors, maze-like discontinuous circulation based on the unusually steep site conditions, a lack of organized administrative space, and an unclear entry sequence.
LDP worked with the San Francisco Unified School District to develop a plan that included a complete modernization. Scope included reconfiguring of interior spaces of the school, capturing additional area, and renovating the entire interior and exterior of the building and site. New designs responded to the school’s programmatic needs, creating corridors for acoustic separation of classrooms, adding a central stair that became the heart of circulation of the building, and a clear entrance to the site and building. Existing architectural features of the original design were preserved and highlighted, including skylights and exposed glu-laminated beams. Interior finishes included red colors for this Catonese Dual Language immersion school to symbolize success & happiness.
The school site design captured additional area to create outdoor learning environments with the Green School Yard program, integrating landscape into the learning experience. An example of this includes fruiting trees in the Cafeteria Patio. Reconfiguring of interior spaces allowed for flexible indoor-outdoor uses at both the cafeteria and library spaces.
Sustainable strategies utilized throughout the school included efficient lighting, HVAC, plumbing fixtures, and non-toxic materials. Solatubes were used to bring daylight into select locations as well as existing and new skylights provided natural daylighting.