450 architects

For more information, please see the Department of Energy’s Buildings Database case study.

New school facilities have the potential to profoundly affect the lives of many generations—through teaching and nurturing children but also through green building that respects health, natural resources, and the environment. Located in the heart of the city's Richmond District, the award-winning Argonne Child Development Center made significant advances for the city's schools. As San Francisco's first solar-powered school, it demonstrates what 450 architects does, and how and why.

This case study reviews the pioneering design of the Argonne Child Development Center:

• illustrating the studio's green design influence with clients and community
• showing the benefits of community outreach in the design process
• demonstrating that sustainable design is achievable and affordable
• creating a pre-school building carefully sited and scaled to the needs of students, teachers, and the neighborhood
• serving as a model and teaching tool

Green Design Influence

Committed to an environmentally conscious approach to life and architecture, 450 architects enjoys working with educators and local communities to create memorable, safe, earth-friendly learning environments. So, we were delighted to be in a position to influence our client, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), to take its first steps toward sustainable building. We also advocated to the local community on solar performance, green building, and environmentally sensitive materials selections.

Making the Case

450 architects believes in sustainable design, so we made the case for a sustainable building. Bringing experience and expertise in green building to the task, our design team took the initiative to explore green design options. To convince SFUSD to go green, we counseled our client on the use of green products as well as renewable energy, including their costs and benefits.

To help make the case, the design team ran model studies on the Pacific Energy Center heliodon. The findings ultimately enabled our design to incorporate roof slope and overhangs that optimize daylighting, take advantage of seasonal sun and shade, and manage heat-buildup and shadow-casting.

Going the Extra Mile

Meanwhile, 450 architects sought grant monies beyond the project budget, to finance the design and installation of a photovoltaic (PV) system for the building. Coupled with neighborhood fund-raisers and solar demos conducted at the site by the design team, this brought in enough new money to include a solar energy system in the design. Later, our design team secured a grant to finance low-maintenance native plants for the landscaping.

This project advances a broader aspect of our mission: to minimize the long-term operating expenses of our public-sector clientele. Once installed, photovoltaics operate at no additional cost and with no loss in efficiency, even as they continue to save taxpayers money far in the future.

Overall, our advocacy helped persuade the School District to integrate the newest solar technology, sustainable building practices, and select green materials into the Argonne Center. The result is San Francisco's first solar-powered school, an asset to the School District and the neighborhood. We believe that this experience also helps move SFUSD toward incorporating sustainable design practices in future facilities construction. The Argonne Center serves as a prototype.

Community Outreach

Community outreach—a hallmark of how our studio works—helped neighbors express their goals and reach a consensus with SFUSD to produce an end result that pleased all parties.

Originally, the School District proposed to close the existing, one-room Argonne Center and sell the parcel of land on which it is located. The district ultimately decided to keep the property and expand the facility. 450 architects worked extensively with the local community through programming meetings and design charrettes.

We examined local demographics that identified a large number of youngsters in the school's age bracket and approaching pre-school age. This evidence demonstrated a real-world need for a larger facility and helped win community support for the project even as it grew to an expansion four times the size of the existing nursery school. Neighbors feared a loss of open space and a negative impact on their much-loved community garden—the oldest and largest in San Francisco. Successful organizing resulted in neighborhood representation in the design process, ensuring that new classrooms could be added to the site to meet the district's needs for more space, while preserving community garden beds.

The community appreciated the design team's extra efforts—writing and winning the grants, educating them about renewable energy—and a collaborative spirit prevailed. Ultimately, neighbors wanted this pre-school to be a sheltering and celebratory space for their children and their community garden. Neighbors and architects shared the spirit of the project and even some of the work itself—working together to plant the landscape and to repair a garden greenhouse after it was damaged in a storm.

Sustainable Design

Simple strategies create a welcoming and comfortable space at the Argonne Center with minimal environmental impact.

Low-Energy Design

The design integrates five PV solar collectors into the roof of the classroom wing. They generate electric power for the school, on cloudy days as well as weekends, contributing substantial savings on operating costs. The translucent PV modules act as skylights, as well, bringing ample, diffused daylighting into the school.

This building has no mechanical cooling and a basic hydronic heating system, making simple but effective use of San Francisco's mild climate. Its deeply shaded east-west solar orientation allows for plenty of shade and ventilation in summer and passive heat gain in winter. The single-room-deep design achieves passive cooling through cross- and stack-effect ventilation. Classrooms can be used almost year-round without artificial lighting. The building's solar-electric system generates a large portion of the energy load.

Green Materials Palette

Providing an environment for children that is healthy, bright, and connected to the outside is naturally connected to the desire to use non-toxic and recycled materials. While the entire proposed green materials palette didn't pass muster with School District guidelines, some of it did. Environmentally sensitive, low-VOC building and interior materials included recycled-content carpet flooring, formaldehyde-free particle board treated with soy-based stains, bio-composite paneling, and sustainably harvested wood.

Low-Maintenance Landscaping

The 0.88-acre site is landscaped with native, drought-resistant plants, including native grasses and strawberries, which require no permanently installed irrigation. The design also preserves a mature grove of eucalyptus. A much-loved, long-established community garden—the largest one in San Francisco—wraps around the school to the north and east. Containing more than 100 garden beds, it supplies food to numerous families as well as a local homeless shelter. Neighborhood gardeners, pleased with efforts to honor their space, gave each class at the Argonne Center a garden plot of its own.

Careful Siting and Scale

The 6,078 s.f. Argonne Center is part of a dense, low-rise residential neighborhood. The design significantly enlarged an existing facility, fitting in with an efficient site plan. Linear classroom construction provides flexibility for multiple uses. Offering a clear distribution of school functions, the plan includes areas for play and high-energy activity and others for quiet activity. On the "quiet" side of the school, the design extends glassed-in reading alcoves toward the garden so students can absorb its sights and smells. Sloping down to the west, the building avoids casting shade on the adjacent community garden.

The design creates an array of useful outdoor spaces. The street-facing administration wing and perpendicular classroom wing enclose a sheltered yet open play area that takes in the southern sun. A large covered walkway, a major feature of the building's passive solar design, provides shade in summer and allows the sun to shine into classrooms in winter. It also extends the classroom for teaching and outdoor play in all weather. An amphitheater tucks into a nearby hill.

A Teaching Tool

450 architects passionately advocated for a solar-powered green building and also translated ideas and concerns from the diverse local community into successful design features that harmonize with the site. And now, the Argonne Center itself is a form of advocacy. San Francisco's first solar-powered school serves as a solar demonstration site and teaching tool for the School District. The facility has been an informative starting point for the American Solar Energy Society's annual national tour of solar homes.

Teachers and students directly experience the use of solar energy in their own school, as well. Above them, in their classrooms, they see the solar collectors in an aluminum skylight system. Kids and adults alike enjoy keeping an eye on the building's energy meter, installed in the reception area, which tracks the amount of electrical power being generated by the PV system.

Argonne Child Development Center Project Team

450 architects
Kin Wo Construction, Inc., contractor
Luster Construction Management, construction manager
Acres Engineering, structural engineer
Hawk Engineers, Inc., mechanical engineer
Cliff Lowe Associates, landscape architect