Billerica has quietly reinvented itself in recent years, yet their former high school - outdated and dysfunctional - misrepresented the town’s true identity. We partnered with the community to reimagine their educational environment and image through the design of their largest civic building.
Handshake: Building siting puts community space in the foreground. After parking at the site’s periphery, the pedestrian environment gracefully welcomes student, teacher, and guest.
Speech: Billerica’s new voice reflects its heritage in a New England mill town while expressing its forward-thinking academic mission. Red brick is reimagined with geometric corbeling, while timber takes new meaning through carbon-conscious detailing. Simple, honest materials are synthesized in inventive, three-dimensional compositions.
Dress: Nearby neoclassical civic neighbors and late-1800s industrial context informed a design that connects distinct elements to speak a humble material language. This language stands as a metaphor for the mission of the “maker” classroom, a part of the school’s guiding curriculum.
Complexion: The school transcends basic academic illumination requirements by premiating natural daylight over artificial light. Inhabiting the prosaic and poetic, both interior and exterior use daylight to capture the rhythms of academic time as the sun pushes shadow around and through the building.
Thought: Classroom wings support department-based teaching now, but allow for a transition to interdisciplinary modalities in the future. By co-locating labs and universal classrooms around open flexible spaces, instructors in different departments are empowered to collaborate in small project-focused “town centers.”
The architecture demonstrates how simplicity gives rise to depth and how we, collectively, can be re-made.
Billerica Memorial High School from Perkins and Will on Vimeo.
All the information about how to enter the 2020 WAN Awards is here.
We are very happy to offer support so please don’t hesitate to email Georgia, WAN Awards Event Coordinator with any questions at Georgia.Baily@haymarket.com.
Last year more than 40 countries took part in the WAN Awards with strong showings from Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific. And we saw some truly outstanding projects, take a look at the winners from last year here.