Project Description
From the Willow School:
The Health, Wellness & Nutrition Center is a 20,000 square foot building that sets new standards for green building design. It contains four classrooms, a faculty room, movement area, dining room, commercial kitchen, health/wellness spaces, extensive agricultural and educational gardens, and a teaching kitchen. All of these spaces will be used creatively to help students make connections between their choices, such as food and energy consumption, and the subsequent impact on other living systems.
Within these walls, and the gardens and grounds beyond them, students develop the new skills and habits of mind necessary for success and resilience in our ever-changing, information-rich world. It is here that they learn to take full responsibility for themselves and the world in which they live.
In the Health, Wellness & Nutrition Center the inextricable link between human virtue and ecology comes to life. In the Energy Gallery, for instance, students gauge real-time energy usage of the heating and cooling system, the lights, or the kitchen equipment. Water use is tracked through its entire cycle — captured as rainwater, filtered and treated by ultraviolet light for use in the bathrooms to flush toilets, and used to irrigate the gardens and grounds.
In this innovative building, students understand that we are all part of a complex matrix of interdependent living systems. This is a new way of thinking: we do not stand apart from nature; we are an integral part of nature, participating and co-evolving with and alongside natural systems. It is our strong foundation in the virtues program combined with knowledge and awareness of living systems that leads to ethical decision-making.
As with the rest of our campus, the buildings and the land, the Health, Wellness & Nutrition Center will be used as a teaching tool to support academic excellence at every grade level and across all areas of the curriculum.