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| Photo:
Tim Hursley |
Photo:
Tom Bonner |
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Click image to download high resolution version |
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Diamond Ranch High School
Pomona, California
Client: Pomona Unified School District
Size: 72 acres (site) / 150,000 s.f. (building)
Complete: 2000 (Completed in association with Thomas Blurock
Architects)
The Diamond Ranch High School blurs the distinctions between
building and landscape, object and field, while concurrently
pursuing a social agenda that is concerned with the culture of
learning. The site investigation focuses on augmented landscape.
Morphosis has been exploring the hybrid territory between building
and site, attempting to transcend the traditional figure-ground
opposition of passive site and active building. The concept of
neutral ground gives way to a strategy of manipulated landscape, as
structure and ground become progressively interchangeable. The
organization of the school emanates from this new conceptual
foundation with the goal of exploring the pedagogical impact of
architecture.
Two rows of fragmented forms are set tightly on either side of a
long central “canyon” or sidewalk that cuts through the face of the
hillside like a geologic fault line and makes clear the vision of
the campus as re-interpreted landscape. Angled walls and canted
volumes establish a purposeful formal language evocative of nature
itself, where roof-scapes fold and bend like shifting geologic
plates. This sidewalk reproduces a more urban experience in contrast
to Pomona’s suburban milieu, providing an intensified throughway to
encourage interaction and create improvisational learning
environments.
Creating clusters of semi-independent units that integrate various
fields of study, the plan defines three distinct “schools within a
school” which foster team teaching in an intimate educational
setting. Lower and upper grades are focused in separate clusters of
classrooms, while landscaped outdoor teaching areas act as courtyard
buffers between buildings and punctuate the classroom units with
views of mountains and sky.
A major focal point is the monumental stairway that doubles as an
amphitheater. It is embedded in the hillside that leads from the
school’s main academic areas to the roof terrace and football field
above. The siting of the playing fields takes advantage of a natural
slope to create an economically efficient hillside seating area.
Thus, the project takes its cue from the site, using topography as
structure while articulating forms whose irregular and intersecting
planes mirror the seismic thrusts of the Southern California
landscape.
The project aspires to reverse the message that has been sent by a
society that routinely communicates its disregard for the young by
educating them in carelessly arranged, temporary bungalows
surrounded by impenetrable chain link fencing. At Diamond Ranch, the
high school’s goals of educational flexibility and social
interaction between students, teachers and administration are
expressed in a thoughtful and heterogeneous design. |
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