Architectural Record publishes Seneca Valley's innovative elementary school

A corridor featuring an impromptu space where students are taking part in an activity. The wall features a variety of materials for creative crafts and projects.

August 29, 2023

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We are proud to share Architectural Record has published Seneca Valley's Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School as part of a four-part feature on innovative PK-12 school design. The article is titled, A School Where Every Day is Like a Field Trip to the Museum.

As the article makes clear, our team with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, set out to conceive a new kind of learning environment that eschews double-loaded corridors and other hallmarks of traditional school design in favor of something more fluid, less formal, and markedly more fun: a school that incorporates the greatest attributes of a children's museum.

The main spiral walkway between floors.

Testimonials

  • “A school bus doesn’t shake when it gets to an elementary school in the morning—you often have to drag the kids off. But when school buses pull up to a children's museum for field trips, you often can see the vehicles physically shaking, the trembling caused by the sheer excitement of the pint-sized passengers inside the bus scrambling to get off.

    We wanted to make the buses shake with excitement when students arrive at Ehrman Crest."

    Michael Corb Houston Education Practice Leader

Architectural Record highlights numerous aspects of Ehrman Crest that differentiate it from traditional school design, including:

  • Porous learning spaces that emphasize hands-on, collaborative learning, and like a museum, give students freedom to explore.
  • A series of large-scale magnetic maps—world, regional, and of the Ehrman Crest campus itself—serve as ever-evolving exhibits where students can track data and share discoveries about the world outside of the school walls.
  • Elementary and middle school classrooms conceived as flexible "learning spaces" with adjacent open collaborative spaces.
  • The school's walls are activated as pegboards where students can curate and explore both analog and digital work overtime.

Testimonials

  • We wanted the corridors of the school to be activated. The walls of a school are usually nondescript—maybe lockers, maybe not—and you just tape art projects in the corridor. We wanted to make the walls participate in teaching the way that those of a museum might—they’re much more prepared for very specific types of display.”

    Troy Hoggard Design Principal
A corridor featuring an impromptu space where students are taking part in an activity. The wall features a variety of materials for creative crafts and projects.
A teacher utilizing one of the hallway spaces to hold a class lesson.

This media coverage builds on significant momentum for Ehrman Crest. The project has previously been recognized as a TIME Invention of the Year and covered by Fast Company and Smithsonian magazine among others.

Read the full article in Architectural Record

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