IRVINGTON HS/MS COMMUNITY CAMPUS
HS/MS Community Campus
HS/MS Community Campus site plan
Dows Lane Elementary School typical classroom
HS/MS Community Campus
The Irvington Middle School/High School Community campus is located on an elongated 30-acre site in a residential neighborhood. The original building, a 90,000-square-foot structure built in 1962, formed an L — a double-loaded corridor classroom wing perpendicular to a gymnasium and auditorium wing. The building was surrounded by playing fields, a large parking lot, and a passive green open space.
To accommodate increases in student enrollment, the community chose to build a new middle school on the site of the existing high school with distinct identities for each school. In addition to the new middle school, the plan for the campus included a new cafeteria/music/science building to serve both schools, and a new theater and gym building to serve the schools and the wider community.
The community campus plan was based on the idea of the agora — the market square of ancient Greece. The campus has been reinvented as a series of informal, outdoor rooms connected by colonnades to shelter students as they move from building to building. The new buildings are organized in concert with the outdoor rooms. All major public spaces and circulation paths engage with these outdoor spaces. On the new campus, separate identities have been created for the high school and the middle school, and enhanced with places for communal learning and interaction.