Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School

Location

Seattle, Washington

Owner

Seattle Academy

Collaborators +

Project Size

69,900 square feet

Project Status

Completed

Services

Architecture, Interior Design, Planning

The Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences (SAAS) Middle School continues the evolution of the school’s urban campus. The new building provides educational programming configured vertically to leverage the limited site, enhance pedagogical principles, and connect with the surrounding community. The Middle School synthesizes its urban condition and program into a six-story academic volume relating in scale to the mixed-use commercial core. A lower volume, dedicated to athletic activities, mirrors the scale of the residential context found along 13th Avenue.

Classrooms, the building block of the program, are organized around collaborative learning spaces promoting project-based coursework and cross-disciplinary discovery. Areas of glazing in each classroom create a transparent and porous connection between classroom and collaboration space, enabling learning activities to flow seamlessly between them. Collaboration spaces are designed as a series of stepped double-height interior volumes that cascade between floors, enhancing visual and physical connectivity between all grades within the stacked program and creating opportunities for students to explore, cross paths, interact and engage beyond the four walls of the classroom.

The building reflects the school’s commitment to a socially and ecologically responsible learning community, where sustainable features actively foster student engagement. The Middle School is configured to provide students with a supportive learning environment that encourages independence, experimentation, and a dialogue between the educational curriculum and the urban neighborhood of Capitol Hill.