Buildings For Education and Cultural Enrichment
The design of public schools, those institutions which educate and deeply influence our next generation of young men and women, was a matter of lively interest and constant research for architect Sternberg. Throughout the years of his practice, starting with a small experimental primary school in Englewood in 1952, there were always one or more schools in the design process or under construction. Almost 40 in all, these included many sizes of elementary, junior high and high schools, located in the Denver metro area (Englewood, Littleton, Sheridan, Jefferson County, Cherry Creek District) and in small towns throughout Colorado (Carbondale, Sterling, Craig, Steamboat Springs, Nucla), Nebraska (Sidney, Kimball, Crawford) and Wyoming (Lance Creek, Lusk). Almost everywhere, in fact, except for the School District of the City and County of Denver. Sternberg was a fierce critic of the limitations placed on architects by Denver in the years he was designing schools. He maintained that these prescriptions resulted in schools designed not for students, nor for teachers, but for janitors. It amused him that the only way a school of his design got into Denver was when the small College View School District, where he had done a large school addition, was annexed into the city.
In 1961, Sternberg decided to move his office to Littleton where he was welcomed by Houston Waring, the influential editor of the local newspaper, The Littleton Independent. His firm designed many buildings in Littleton, including two of the most important educational projects of Sternberg's career, Arapahoe Community College and Heritage High School (Littleton, Colorado).
Arapahoe Community College was a long time in the making, and Sternberg was involved from the start in its creative evolution. The State of Colorado' s preference was for buying virgin land on the outskirts of the town and developing a campus of one or two-story scattered buildings, but after considering 20 different sites, Sternberg's argument that it should be located in the heart of the Littleton community won out. A 51-acre site was developed as an urban renewal project. All the college's needs were met in one megastructure. This design approach preserved the old trees on the site, provided adequate parking, and, Sternberg believed, would promote more interaction between students and faculty of different disciplines. The building is of concrete in what is today described as the modernist style. As a community college, the facility has been highly successful. Its design has been the subject of much debate, with some students enjoying it and others characterizing it unfavorably as "Sternberg's Slab." In recent years, a large, glass-filled entrance structure has been added with the intention of softening the original, spare design.
Heritage High School, serving 2,000 students, was considered by Sternberg to be his best school design. It had a magnificent well equipped theater, a complete arts and crafts department, a spacious music department, a first-class library on two levels, and a number of informal meeting areas or "commons" throughout the building. The school was built on three levels, making use of the site's 35-foot slope. All floors were accessible from the outside by the handicapped. The firm received an award for designing the first high school totally accessible to the handicapped. Going against the prevailing standard that a school of this size needed 50 acres of land, Sternberg persuaded the School Board that he could accommodate all the school's outdoor needs on one-half of this acreage. He persuaded them to spend the savings on landscaping the entire site, with grass sod, sprinkler systems and mature trees planted everywhere. The school was a marked contrast to the typical high schools of the time, which had a small green area in front and the rest of the land covered in gravel.
Designing schools and colleges gave the Sternberg firm considerable experience in the planning of efficient, economical, user-friendly libraries. This background proved valuable when they were commissioned to design a new public library for Aurora and the Bemis public library in Littleton .
Read more about this topic: Eugene Sternberg
Famous quotes containing the words buildings, education, cultural and/or enrichment:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hard times accounted in large part for the fact that the exposition was a financial disappointment in its first year, but Sally Rand and her fan dancers accomplished what applied science had failed to do, and the exposition closed in 1934 with a net profit, which was donated to participating cultural institutions, excluding Sally Rand.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil which bears the sweet flower of peace ...”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)