DIAMOND RANCH HIGH SCHOOL
PA 1997 AWARD
DIAMOND BAR, CALIFORNIA MORPHOSIS WITH THOMAS BLUROCK ARCHITECTS
Architecture; Nov2000, Vol. 89 Issue 11, p132, 14p, 7c, Betsky, Aaron.
A folded surface undulates across the site in a geometric abstraction of existing contour lines--this creased plane became the building's roofs.
The Diamond Ranch High School unfolds out of the landscape in waves of fractured form to become a civic structure of astonishing beauty. Confronted with the pragmatic challenges of moving more than a million cubic feet of dirt around a steep site in suburban Los Angeles, a budget of $145 a square foot, and a society in which secondary education often takes place in prisonlike bunkers, architect Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis has excavated a significant civic structure with the capacity to edify, educate, and delight.
Diamond Ranch is a stretch of hills that Californians euphemistically call "golden" (i.e., nearly barren, except for a few lonely oak trees). While the rest of the area is fast succumbing to sprawl, the Diamond Ranch High School's especially precipitous, 72-acre site was considered unbuildable because its unstable soils were likely to slide into the road-cut of a highway. The Pomona School District capitalized on the site's supposed uselessness, acquiring the land for a dollar from a nearby municipality's redevelopment agency and then obtaining $5 million from the state to stabilize the hillside. In negotiations with the state and environmental pressure groups such as the Sierra Club, the school district agreed that no soil would be removed from or added to the site.
"It all worked out, because in a high school you have to start with the playing fields anyway," comments Mayne, referring to the vast amounts of space most high schools devote to sports. Working with Thom Blurock of Blurock Partnership (a California-based firm with a specialty in schools) and Olveri Engineering, Mayne won a limited design-build competition that the school district staged in 1994. He proposed to tame the 380-foot drop across the site with three terraces: an upper playing field, the school, and a lower playing field. Further grading provided access and parking for 770 cars to the south of the main building site.
Mayne did not treat the site work as separate from the design of structures, but rather saw the whole task as a refolding of the land into a building. "I am interested not in making isolated objects, but in how plates can become forms," he explains. Working closely with project architect John Enwright, Mayne developed the concept of a folded surface that undulates across the site in a geometric abstraction of existing contour lines--this creased plane became the school's roof. Because of the way Mayne and Enwright manipulated them, the forms make visible the site's inherent topography, while at the same time appearing to be monumental and abstracted versions of the waves of pitched roofs covering the suburban homes below.
A particular program governed the making of spaces within this derived landscape. Superintendent of the Pomona school district Patrick Leier was concerned from the beginning with "how we keep students connected in such a large school; how we keep things smaller; how we blend with the site." He and his team proposed breaking the 2,000-student school down into small clusters with no more than 300 students in each, and asked Mayne to think of the facility more as a campus in the collegiate sense.
Mayne responded by cutting through his plates to create three separate wings for the ninth and tenth grades. These thin bar-buildings cantilever out over the slope and open up to playing fields on the north. On the south side of the building, he organized classrooms for the remaining two grades around small, internal courtyards. Teachers also have offices associated with each cluster. While the southern classroom buildings exhibit all the assertive exuberance of modernist construction, the back wing creates intimate and introspective spaces that mine the hill for small oases of academic gathering.
An internal street winds its way between the row of classroom wings on the north and through the class clusters on the south. The street twists between the roof's folds and the functional spaces, tying the volumes and the roof plane together into a coherent assembly. It is a canyon, but also a village street with activities. Periodically, the roof plunges down to meet buildings placed at slightly different angles, in a choreography of vertical measure and horizontal flow. Because of the separation between the wings to the north, the views always make students and faculty aware of the world outside, while the density of forms to the south roots the communal gathering space in the site.
The school's organization is thus rather conventional. The northern and southern classroom wings open on a central spine between the eastern and western wings. At the east end of this central corridor are the main entrance and gathering spaces: a library and administration building, a gymnasium, a cafeteria, and a multifunction room. Here the steel trusses holding up the roof are visible both inside and out, and the stucco-clad walls and glass planes rise up to announce the school's identity. These large spaces are what the public sees first and what students can use to orient themselves as they return periodically to them for communal activities. They introduce the school and give it an identity like a pedimented and columned entry in your standard Central High. The facilities can also be used by the community.
Mayne has in many ways done no more than find the central idea of a conventionally organized school-with its long, double-loaded corridor with classrooms on either side and a controlling facade of administrative space-buried within the logic of the school's program. Rather than cladding this shape, he has treated the corridor like a cut in the ground, excavated one arm of classrooms and cantilevered the other, and then unfolded the formal front using his system of site analysis.
"At this stage in my career I am more involved in how you set up a strict system, and then open it up," Mayne claims. "I am concerned with how you create both difference and coherence out of the manipulation of a set of conditions, rather than adding them on to a simple shape."
To Mayne, this is not just an abstract working method. With two sons in high school, he understands such institutions as places where students learn about a tense cultural and political system that somehow remains coherent, and he wants his buildings to be part of that education: "By cutting into the lines we set up, which were based on the landscape, we initiated accidents and exploited them," he explains. "The result is heterogeneity and even conflict within something that still hangs together."
Superintendent Leier, who has gone on to expand on the "college campus" model in several other schools in Pomona, one of which was previously a shopping mall, agrees that the school should be "a place where students learn just from looking around themselves. It is really a model community," he says. What at first appears to be a confluence of tortured planes rising up out of a barren and banal landscape finally resolves itself into a model for civic architecture. Thanks to Mayne's structural expression, response to site and program, and a few willful gestures, the school offers intricacy, complexity, and a sense of discovery appropriate to the act of learning.
DIAMOND RANCH HIGH SCHOOL, DIAMOND BAR, CALIFORNIA
CLIENT: Pomona Unified School District, Diamond Bar, California-Patrick Leier (superintendent) ARCHITECT: Morphosis, Santa Monica, California-Thom Mayne (principal); John Enright (project architect); Cameron Crockett, David Grant, Fabian Kremkus, Janice Shimizu, Patrick J. Tighe (project team); Sarah Allan, Kaspar Baumeister, Jay Behr, John Bencher, Mark Briggs, Frank Brodbeck, Takashi Ehira, Magdalena Glen, Ivar Gudmunson, George Hernandez, Martin Krammer, Ming Lee, Francisco Mouzo, Christopher Payne, Kinga Racon, Robyn Sambo, Andreas Schaller, Bennet Shen, Mark Sich, Craig Shimahara, Tadao Shimizu, Steve Slaughter, Brandon Welling, Eui-Sung Yi (project assistants)
ASSOCIATE ARCHITECT: Thomas Blurock Architects--Thom Blurock (principal); Tom Moore (project architect); Mark Briggs, Kevin Fleming, Nadar Glassemlou, Chris Samuelian, Kristina Steeves, Jose Valentin, Wendell Vaughn, Lis Zuloaga (project team); Gregory Aston, Colleen Bathgate, Mike Blozek, Vince Coffeen, Karen MacIntyre, Kathy Sun, Brady Titus, Robert Trucios LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: Allen Don Fong ENGINEERS: Ove Arup & Partners (structural); Andreasen Engineering (civil) GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Bernards Brothers COST: Withheld at client's request
(unfortunately these pictures did not come with the article so I have attached some other photos of the same subjects)
PHOTO (COLOR): Evoking the piazza of a Tuscan hill town, the courtyard at the heart of Diamond Ranch High School overlooks the suburbs of Los Angeles.
PHOTO (COLOR): ARRIVAL The school's principal entrance sits at the corner of a two-sided forecourt (above). Students proceed from the parking lot, past a gymnasium, cafeteria and multifunction room (left, at left) to a staircase alongside a library and administration block (at right).
PHOTO (COLOR): THRESHOLD A small courtyard (facing page, bottom) at the head of the entrance stair terminates a central, external corridor (or "street") that winds through the school. Ramps connect two levels of cantilevered classroom wings on the north side of the corridor as seen looking toward the landscape (facing page, to right) and backward toward the school (facing page, top left).
PHOTO (COLOR): MOVEMENT Mayne formed the school's central corridor with tilted, corrugated-steel walls to create an abstraction of a natural ravine or of the false storefronts of an American main street (facing page, top left). Breaks in the walls provide views of the surrounding landscape and suggest gathering places for student's (facing page, top right and bottom).
PHOTO (COLOR): PERMEABILITY A monumental angled roof and glazed farade denote the school's principal gathering space, the multipurpose gymnasium (left). A large opening in the wall of the band room (top) allows it to double as an impromptu stage. Daylight from tree-planted courtyards (above) illuminates 11th- and 12th- grade classrooms.
PHOTO (COLOR): EVENT Exposed steel structure and artfully controlled lighting provide simple animation in the principal gathering spaces--the gymnasium (facing page, top) and library (facing page, bottom left)--as well as in classrooms (facing pages, bottom right).
PHOTO (COLOR): SITE WORK Three classroom wings cantilever over the playing fields (facing page, at right). Staircases (top) cut into the hillside and connect the school to the playing fields A ramp (above winds down from the library and administration block.
you can see plans at: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/morphosis/diamond/index.htm
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