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Architects: Studio B Architecture + Interiors
- Area: 19500 ft²
- Year: 2015
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Photographs:Greg Watts
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Architect of Record: Cuningham Group
Text description provided by the architects. The Aspen Community School offers a unique and stimulating K-8 learning environment surrounded by the mountain landscape of Woody Creek, Colorado. Established as a charter school in 1970, ACS provides its students with an education focused on a diversity of experiences, freedom of expression and trust in a child’s intrinsic curiosity.
With 360 degree views of the Roaring Fork Valley, the Aspen Community School includes a new classroom & community building that is fully integrated into the site and a new gymnasium. The school administration, the students, and the community at large have been instrumental in the design process to achieve the optimal learning environment while reflecting on its unique character and history. Materials which reflect the colors of the surrounding landscape ground the architecture to the site. into the site.
Site and landscaping improvements result in safer vehicular/pedestrian circulation, enhanced play areas and a reinforced sense of campus and community. Substantial site utility upgrades to this rural site have also been realized.
Studio B Architecture + Interiors (the Design Architect) and Cuningham Group (Architect-of- Record) directed a collaborative process to achieve campus facilities that support innovative learning, that reinforce the cultural and historical identity of the school, and that fit comfortably in the natural landscape of the existing school campus.
The school administration, teachers, students, parents and the community at large were instrumental in the design process that included many small-group work-sessions, regular Design Advisory Group meetings, and frequent public presentations. The result of this consensus-building effort is a design that achieves the vision and goals of the school, satisfies the desired current and future programmatic requirements and is truly the product of all community members that participated.
