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Cesar Chavez Elementary School
Long Beach, California
Photography:
Chris Costea, Costea Photography
2006 CMACN Awards Edition, “CMU Profiles in Architecture”
Jury Comments: The school is sited adjacent to a park with its buildings clustered on a tight site. The building facades adjacent to the urban streets are tight, crisp, and fairly common. The space within and between the buildings has a lively, sweeping, collegiality to it, which becomes the heart of the complex. The detailing is sharp and energized, and the concrete masonry connects to the ground with other appropriate materials above. The use of natural light brightens up the utilitarian spaces within.
The salient aspects of the project program included the
integration of the joint use components with the community
redevelopment agency, the Long Beach Aquarium of the
Pacific, and Long Beach Memorial Hospital.
The community aspects of the building program shaped the basic design decisions concerning site layout, access, orientation, security and internal adjacencies. Layered with the districts desire to create a sustainable solution, the facility in a sense became shaped by performance and function.
The program for Cesar Chavez Elementary School required the different integration of community use as well as district use. Clear and simple security systems to protect both entities determined site design strategies very early in the design phase of the project. In addition, the integration of existing park area for daytime school use offered specific constraints on the building configuration. Sustainability became an integral component not only to the final solution, but to the design process as well as energy and cost saving strategies as well as indoor environmental qualities determined HVAC systems, building orientation, openings, and landscape and material selections.
Burnished, concrete masonry formed an aesthetic as well as functional base for the school and was specifically chosen for durability and planning flexibility. By constructing the school from concrete masonry, columns were eliminated within the classrooms providing more usable learning environments.
The school required a sensitive and effective solution to bring together the desires of the district, the community, and the local neighborhood.
Architect:
LPA,
Inc.
5161 California Avenue,
Suite 100
Irvine, CA 92617
Richard
D’Amato, AIA
Principal
Structural
Engineer:
Culp & Tanner
General
Contractor:
FTR International
Masonry
Contractor:
FTR International
Block
Producer:
Angelus Block Company, Inc.
Owner:
Long Beach Unified School District
