Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Campus Master Plan Unveiled at California School

  • 12/08/17

Parallax Architects and The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, Ca. are pleased to unveil "Archer Forward," a bold and elegant Campus Master Plan proposed for the school’s historic campus. The Master Plan will help fulfill Archer’s promise and mission to provide an innovative 21st century education for girls while respecting the campus’ rich architectural history and neighborhood setting. Construction on “Archer Forward” is scheduled to begin in December; a groundbreaking ceremony will take place on December 8, 2017.

Archer School for Girls

The forward-looking plan represents the gold standard in girls’ education and how architecture can and should guide that mission. Having grown from just 30 students when it first began classes 22 years ago, to enrollment of nearly 500 students today, Archer found it imperative to expand its facilities and offerings to broaden its reach as a leading educational institution for today’s young women.

“Craig Jameson and Joseph Masotta of Parallax Architects conceived a master plan that conveys an absolute belief in our girls’ potential to succeed, ascend, and lead,” says Head of School Elizabeth English. “What is more, they have done so with an elegant yet powerful design that will further elevate Archer's campus as an icon among Los Angeles architecture.”

The "Archer Forward” plan combines two objectives. First, to preserve the campus’ signature historic building, the former Eastern Star Home—a 1931 Los Angeles Cultural Historic Monument, which architectural critic Aaron Betsky once claimed “seems to have come about as the result of centuries of thought and planning.” Second, to transform the existing grounds into an entirely new, all pedestrian campus encompassing approximately seven acres and four new buildings.

 New features include an Arrival Garden to welcome visitors to the campus; an Academic Center, to replace the existing building’s non-historic North Wing; an Athletic Center to support the Upper and Middle Schools’ physical education and athletic programs; a 350-seat Performing Arts Center; and a Visual Arts Center, all supported by parking facilities located below a new athletic field for soccer and softball.

Featured

  • Designing for Every Mind

    Learning environments have the power to shape not just what students know, but who they become. When a school is designed with genuine empathy—for the full range of ways students think, sense, and engage with the world—it becomes more than a building. It becomes a catalyst for growth, confidence, and belonging. That is the animating idea behind neurodiverse design, and it is one that is transforming how more architects and designers are thinking about school design.

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Planning with Clarity: Using AI to Make Better Campus Decisions, Not Just Better Designs

    Higher education leaders are being asked to make increasingly high-stakes decisions about campus facilities amid greater uncertainty than ever before. Social and economic pressures, shifting enrollment, and evolving learning models compete with growing deferred maintenance needs to strain even the most robust infrastructure budgets.

  • Colorado School District Breaks Ground on Unified PK–12 Campus

    The Haxtun School District No. Re-2J in Haxtun, Colo., recently announced that ground has been broken on a renovation/addition project that will unite its two schools, Haxtun Elementary and Haxtun Jr/Sr High School, according to a news release.