While we know that the aesthetic design of educational buildings is important, the most critical aspects are the school’s functionality - making sure it is preparing students for the future. Our recent work is not only educationally innovative but showcases projects that meet a district’s goals and represent the values of a community. Our portfolio also exemplifies the application of current trends and the focus placed on equality within education programs. Education design must consider many factors to achieve success amongst students, staff and community members. This is all accomplished in buildings that are beautiful, inspiring and fiscally responsible.
Our design process starts with listening to you. Through our participatory planning process, we bring multiple stakeholders together to represent your community's various views and beliefs. We facilitate planning discussions to define criteria specific to your project goals and base our designs directly upon those criteria. From meeting to meeting, we will show and explain how the planning group’s input directly impacted and modified the plans. This approach stays consistent throughout the entirety of the project as it allows constant dialogue with your staff to ensure alignment, ownership and consensus.
We are at a pivotal point in education programs. Educators are discarding the teaching paradigms that revolve solely around a lecture-based format. New methods of teaching and a renewed focus on personalized learning are demanding new learning environments and processes. We bring our collaborative skills to the conversation to design new spaces suited for 21st-century learning and to help inspire new thinking and creativity in your teaching staff. Our flexible designs, paired with your programmed curriculum, can also empower students to engage in independent learning and participate in exploratory classes. We design with new trends in mind to continue to inspire students and staff to learn every day.
“Wold understands schools...the needs and the flexibility in classrooms...how teachers teach and a variety of students learn. It was a huge advantage.”
Schools play a critical role in providing need to at-risk students and families. A significant number of students rely on schools to provide some level of food, mental and physical healthcare and social service assistance and protection. For many of these students, without their base level of needs being met, the chances of achieving similar academic performance to their peers is not possible. From our architectural perspective, we strive to use our knowledge to equalize the starting point for all students to achieve greater academic achievements. Schools play a significant role in physically fostering integrated services for students and families, so we work to incorporate these services into the designs of our learning environments. Students should have access to healthcare practitioners such as dentists and therapists, and access a bank and food services when they deem necessary. In addition to academic programs, education design must advocate for every student's health, well-being and success.