In The Media January 4, 2021

Billerica Memorial High School Featured in Architectural Record’s Schools of the 21st Century Issue

The new high school has helped to transform the perception of the entire suburban Massachsuetts community.
Picture of students on playing field in front of Billerica Memorial High School

Billerica, a suburban town northwest of Boston, has quietly reinvented itself in recent years. What began as a 17th-century agrarian town is now a talent pool for the high-tech industry in the greater Boston area, with students earning regional and national accolades in business, robotics, drama, and athletics. We partnered with students, staff, and community members to design a flexible, forward-looking educational environment that matched their myriad achievements and contemporary identity. Now, the town’s largest civic building embodies Billerica’s aspirational commitment to education while honoring its historic civic legacy. The result is a project that has “mined the past and looked to the future,” according to Architectural Record‘s “Schools of the 21st Century” issue.

Read more about this transformative project.

Significantly, the town’s heritage and identity of “humble pride” are evoked through a simple, durable material language, ratcheted up a notch, imbuing the prosaic with poetry.

Beth Broome, Architectural Record

Students walking in front of the school's north-facing elevation.
A more modern material language on the north-facing elevation "allowed us to look to the future," says principal and project leader Brooke Trivas.
The school’s neoclassical civic neighbors and late-1800s industrial context informed a design that speaks a humble, understated material language.
An interdisciplinary hub in the new Billerica Memorial High School
Historic images from the town’s archives were used to identify each interdisciplinary neighborhood with a unique statement of purpose and pride.