Ransom Everglades School, STEM Building
When Ransom Everglades School envisioned a STEM-focused addition for their campus, they wanted to rethink how the education space could reflect the future-focused learning that would happen there. We collaborated to bring a multidisciplinary approach to education for both faculty and students that would enhance team-based learning and promote an environment of thought leadership, experimentation, and creativity.
Our design drivers included creating spaces that promote social responsibility, leadership, inclusion, and respect. Using the same concepts that are practiced in new corporate campuses, research facilities, and higher education campuses, our project team designed a space with the imperative that students interact and learn to work in these professional environments early in their education.
The result is a building that serves as a lantern and living laboratory, showcasing the future of STEM and Ransom Everglade’s continuing leadership in academic excellence.
The building’s main circulation spine creates hubs of collaboration with full transparency and spaces that can be reconfigured at each level. An outdoor grand stairway or student commons, outfitted with power and data infrastructure, provides the opportunity to showcase learning, impromptu lectures or exhibitions as well as formal scenarios ranging from outdoor theater productions and performances, to guest lectures. Technology throughout the facility allows for local, national and international connectivity and enables students to remain informed of the building’s performance, featured projects, class activities, and general information.
Today, learning occurs at all times of day and in all kinds of environments. Technology has allowed for a more fluid interaction with information. Formal classrooms or laboratories are only one of the many spaces where students and teachers interact. It is of the utmost importance in today’s educational facilities to create informal spaces, emphasizing the “space in-between”. The Ransom Everglades STEM building design recognizes this and provides an array of informal learning spaces.
