Albany Middle School

Albany Unified School District
Albany, California

Albany Middle School is an urban campus for 750 students that is located on a moderately sloped, four acre urban site, surrounded on two sides by single-family residences and an apartment building and adjoined by the high school’s football field on the North and BART tracks on the East. Its design was developed over several months in a series of meetings with administrators, faculty members, and members of the community. The residential character of the school's design responds to the neighborhoods desire minimize the scale of the school building and to blend the structures with the context of the adjoining properties. The challenge of the project was to provide 73,455 square feet of school facilities, adequate play space, and staff parking on a 4-acre site that minimizes the noise created by regularly passing BART trains. This was accomplished by creative site planning, the simplicity of the building’s space planning and the simplicity of the structural design.

It should be noted that these facilities are located within 1 kilometer of the Hayward Fault, a major California earthquake fault. To address the communities concern for seismic safety the structural design of this building incorporated the effects of near source seismic events. It should be noted that the structural design was accomplished at the same time the codes determining the requirements for near source seismic events were being drafted by the State of California.

Aerial Photograph by Proehl Studios