Special Report: New Jersey

High-Tech K-12

Newark School is a Grade-A Science Project

by Katherine S. Robertson

The new $64 million Science Park High School under construction in Newark has a lofty mission - to boost the number of city students attending its home-grown colleges and universities.

That goal is one reason the 290,150-sq.-ft. high school's design reflects a college-level approach to learning, said Jorge Szendiuch, a principal with Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering, headquartered in Albany, N.Y. Project features like exposed structural steel and a geothermal heating-and-cooling system aim to highlight engineering and design functions, giving students an eye-level understanding of the elements of construction.

"There's more of an emphasis on structure than decorative elements," Szendiuch said.

Covering two city blocks, the school is unique in its design, focus, and symbolism, said Jack Spencer, CEO of the New Jersey School Construction Corp., the state agency overseeing the project. "It is the first new high school in Newark in 40 years, a symbol of Newark's efforts to revitalize its neighborhoods and bring them back to life," he said.

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Science Park was one of the first projects to get funding under the state's $8.6 billion school capital construction program rolled out in 2002. But the city's school system and local institutions of higher education had already forged a partnership dating back to 1998. Four key University Heights neighbors - the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Essex County Community College, Rutgers University's Newark campus, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey - all played a role in the planning, vision, and design of Science Park from the onset.

That's why as soon as funding became available, the team was able to finalize the design and get the project into the ground. As a result, demolition began in fall 2003, and the state awarded the construction contract in early 2004. The project schedule calls for work to wrap up by January 2006, with substantial completion of the building by late 2005, but work on the adjoining playing fields and parking lot wrapping up at the project close.

The fit is tight, squeezing the 600 ft. by 160 ft. building footprint onto a site measuring about 700 ft. by 250 ft., said Lincoln Heffner, project manager for Hunt Construction Group of Princeton, N.J., the construction manager on the job. The site includes an adjacent block, but since it is slated to serve as the school's parking and fields, the team can't use that extra block for staging and setup on the school building. Indeed, the team has already had to start building demolition, environmental remediation, and site assembly work for the lot and fields.

The site has presented other tricky scenarios. High-tension wires span across the space where the crane operators would normally do a straight lift of the structural steel. Instead, the crane has to swing below the wires before raising its load for erection.

Another challenge is that less than one-third of the building's footprint has a basement, which required the project team to position spread footings on a water-infused strata of fractured shale. The rest of the building is standard slab on grade.

The portion of the building dedicated for lab space and educational use - usually a complex element in a school project - ended up as one of the most straightforward aspects, Heffner said. But fitting together the rest of the building wasn't so easy. He called it a cookie-cutter assortment of shapes and sizes for disparate uses. In a single section, for instance, there was a basement swimming pool whose ceiling was the floor of a two-story gymnasium. Also sharing walls and horizontal planes within the same module are a theater, fly tower, and auditorium. "It's like taking five different-shaped blocks and putting them together," Heffner said.

As the project moves forward, the schedule aims to close off the building and start on interior work by next summer, said Tim Miller of Newark-based PB+D3/I, a joint venture of Parsons Brinckerhoff and 3D/International, Inc., that is providing project management services on Newark schools for the state construction corporation.

Many of the features in the core building housing 800 to 1,200 students will have a high-tech theme. Among the highlights are a media and technology center with an ITV lab, a long-distance learning system, and CAD technology. Other features include a fabrication room for robotics and other science-related activities, as well as an independent science research area.

Beyond the technology, the design incorporates many innovations to meet new educational priorities. One involves dividing the facility into "neighborhoods," instead of by curriculum and grade. That encourages multidisciplinary learning, Szendiuch said.

Another is having 1,200-sq-ft. classrooms, significantly larger than the typical 800-sq.-ft. high school room layout. The larger space offers room for individual workstations that are crucial to the school's mission. "It's student-focused, not teacher-focused," Szendiuch added.

The design also fulfills a prime project goal to make the building accessible to the public. In that vein, the auditorium, library, and theater will all be easy for community residents to find and use.

The school is also going to be pleasing to the eye. The three-story building will have a steel-framed glass atrium that will serve as the structure's chief point of orientation. Szendiuch said the atrium also brings additional natural light into the facility. Likewise, the hand-laid brick and glass exterior will highlight the building's curves, while the skin surrounding the gym is metal panel.

Capping the project's well-roundedness, the building has quite a few sustainable design features, "which is perfect, because it's a science school," Szendiuch said. In the stairs, diagonal bracing for seismic reinforcing is visible to the eye. Photovoltaic panels are on the roof, added primarily as a design bonus, since they are not a core part of the building's energy systems.

Then there's the geothermal heating-and-cooling system that vents air through a supply-and-return network, taking it to a field of nearly 400 wells punched 45 ft. into the ground. A retractable steel sleeve will support the augured holes at the top. Once the team inserts the pipes, it will pour betonite slurry into the hole, providing a point of contact between the piping and the ground.

In the same vein, the design calls for a sun screen that follows the rows of classroom windows along the west face on the second and third floors. Like other design elements in the building, the extruded aluminum louvers have both practical and visual purposes. The louvers reduce the demand on heating and cooling systems, because in summer, the screens provide a heat filter, and in colder months they channel the sun's rays. Most importantly, said Szendiuch, they fit the overall theme.

"It's a high-tech look," he said. "It creates an image for the building that follows the science and technology programs."