Boora Architects

Flexibility, connectivity, and sustainability are the hallmarks of the 58,783-square-foot Ash Creek Intermediate School. Designed to initially accommodate 5th and 6th grade students, the school will eventually house kindergarten through 5th grade as the school district completes the final stages of a long-range facility plan and reapportions the student population between its various facilities.

While the school's classrooms support all of the instructional and recreational needs for an elementary and middle school curriculum, they are arranged in a way that floods them with soft, diffuse daylight, making the Ash Creek Intermediate School one of the most sustainable schools in the country.  Each classroom opens onto an interior multipurpose space, whose ceiling is raised above the height of the classroom.  Glass is used to enclose the space between these two heights, drawing natural light into these internal spaces and allowing the classrooms to be daylit from two sides.

Solatube skylights harvest sunlight and direct it to the parts of the classroom furthest from the perimeter, so that daylight is available in what are traditionally the darkest areas of a room.

The school's corridors and its shared spaces, such as the gym and media center, also feature raised ceilings and extensive clerestory glazing, which not only allow those space to be naturally lit but also introduce light into the building which can be harvested for adjacent spaces.

The design team extensively modeled the building to refine the daylight strategy, which included electronic modeling of the integrated sun shades and light shelves used on the building's exterior to draw light into the classrooms. We also conducted daylight tests in the artificial sky and heliodon operated by the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory. The artificial sky mirror box simulates the light of the sky while the heliodon models the angle of light between the light source and the scale model in order to simulate the angle of light at the location where the building being modeled is located.