School Where Nature Is the Teacher

The two new Cathcart schools in Snohomish, Washington, let nature takes its place at the chalkboard.

Designed by NAC|Architecture, the buildings -- one an elementary school, the other a high school -- won an award in the 2010 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Educational Facility Design Awards for their "rich and varied relationship to nature." Other honorees included a bio-manufacturing research institute in Durham, North Carolina (below), a middle school in Tacoma, Washington, and a sustainably designed elementary school in Manassas Park, Virginia. (For a complete list of winners go here.)

[A different AIA winner: A biotech school where the window arrangement was inspired by images of DNA sequencing]

The Cathcart schools are designed to bring the natural world to the fore of students' education. Set down in the heart of a former second-growth forest, they have an endless tract of trees and mountains in their backyard. Campus is littered with salvaged logs and boulders. A walking path bisects the 65-acre site, linking the schools along a thoroughfare of plants and tree stumps and grassy knolls. Inside, windows galore usher the outdoors in.

Plenty of schools nowadays are trying to glom onto the environmental revolution. We've got school-side farms and net-zero classrooms and PV-studded portables.

Cathcart is unique in that its invocations of nature aren't tacked on; they pervade practically every aspect of the design. Partly that's a matter of luck. Not everyone can build a school that looks out onto the Cascades. Partly it's a matter of adding whatever earthy elements you can to man-made areas that necessarily encroach on the site's natural beauty like playing fields and courtyards.

As the architects tell it, ?Integration of the site's memory should hopefully raise students' and the community's awareness of the fragility and importance of our natural habitat." The effect is a subtle one, and at a time when many students are loaded up on extracurriculars and wired to the teeth to boot, it's probably not going to turn anyone into the next John Muir. But it's a not a bad start.

[Images courtesy of NAC|Architecture]