A new charter school has broken ground in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood. Operated by Bright Star Schools and designed by L.A. firm Berliner Architects, Rise Kohyang High School (RKHS) will serve about 600 students in grades 9 to 12 and is slated to open in the fall of 2023.
With almost 88,000 square feet, the $40 million high school is an L-shaped, three-story building with a central courtyard. The outdoor space can be accessed via the ground-level multipurpose room/lunch area and school offices. On opposite ends of the building, two stairways lead to the second floor, providing access to 24 classrooms on two levels, a library/media room, and additional staff areas. Offices are placed on all three floors to provide student supervision and facilitate collaboration among administrative staff and teachers. A second-floor balcony overlooks the courtyard.
Around the campus perimeter, fencing both creates a secure enclosure and gives students a visual connection to the outside. The fence also features the school’s name in a mix of English and Korean, a nod to the school’s community.
“Space is sparse and expensive in Los Angeles,” Richard Berliner, principal of Berliner Architects, said in a statement. “Our primary challenge was accommodating RKHS students, faculty, and staff while programming an outdoor space on an extraordinarily small, 1.2-acre site. We designed the courtyard to act as the school’s main entryway and took advantage of the naturally sloping campus topography to integrate a partially subterranean ground level for parking and student drop-off.”
The project meets design guidelines from the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) for reduced energy consumption and increased sustainability. Green features promote water conservation, energy efficiency, greenhouse-gas emission reduction, and indoor environmental quality. Skylights, louvered sun blades, and roller-type window shades balance natural light and solar heat gain.
Berliner Architects is also designing the $35 million Rise Kohyang Middle School, located about two miles from RKHS.
Building Team:
Owner and/or developer: Bright Star Schools
Design architect: Berliner Architects
Architect of record: Berliner Architects
MEP engineer: Budlong and Associates
Structural engineer: Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers
General contractor/construction manager: Bernards
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
High School in a Hurry
One of the more compelling arguments for charter schools is their theoretical ability to streamline decision making. Eliminate all those layers of bureaucratic fat that clog the arteries of most public school systems, the argument goes, and decisions can be made to flow much more smoothly, even when it comes to designing and building a major school project.
| Aug 11, 2010
Bronze Award: Garfield High School, Seattle, Wash.
Renovations to Seattle's historic Garfield High School focused mainly on restoring the 85-year-old building's faded beauty and creating a more usable and modern interior. The 243,000-sf school (whose alumni include the impresario Quincy Jones) was so functionally inadequate that officials briefly considered razing it.
| Aug 11, 2010
Managing the K-12 Portfolio
In 1995, the city of New Haven, Conn., launched a program to build five new schools and renovate and upgrade seven others. At the time, city officials could not have envisioned their program morphing into a 17-year, 44-school, $1.5 billion project to completely overhaul its entire portfolio of K-12 facilities for nearly 23,000 students.
| Aug 11, 2010
Financial Wizardry Builds a Community
At 69 square miles, Vineland is New Jersey's largest city, at least in geographic area, and it has a rich history. It was established in 1861 as a planned community (well before there were such things) by the utopian Charles Landis. It was in Vineland that Dr. Thomas Welch found a way to preserve grape juice without fermenting it, creating a wine substitute for church use (the town was dry).
| Aug 11, 2010
School Project Offers Lessons in Construction Realities
Imagine this scenario: You're planning a $32.9 million project involving 112,000 sf of new construction and renovation work, and your job site is an active 32-acre junior-K-to-12 school campus bordered by well-heeled neighbors who are extremely concerned about construction noise and traffic. Add to that the fact that within 30 days of groundbreaking, the general contractor gets canned.
| Aug 11, 2010
High Tech High International used to be a military facility
High Tech High International, reconstructed inside a 1952 Navy metal foundry training facility, incorporates the very latest in teaching technology with a centerpiece classroom known as the UN Theater, which is modeled after the UN chambers in New York. The interior space, which looks more like a hip advertising studio than a public high school, provides informal, flexible seating areas, abunda...
| Aug 11, 2010
High-Performance Modular Classrooms Hit the Market
Over a five-day stretch last December, students at the Carroll School in Lincoln, Mass., witnessed the installation of a modular classroom building like no other. The new 950-sf structure, which will serve as the school's tutoring offices for the next few years, is loaded with sustainable features like sun-tunnel skylights, doubled-insulated low-e glazing, a cool roof, light shelves, bamboo tri...
| Aug 11, 2010
Special Recognition: Pioneering Efforts Continue Trade School Legacy
Worcester, Mass., is the birthplace of vocational education, beginning with the pioneering efforts of Milton P. Higgins, who opened the Worcester Trade School in 1908. The school's original facility served this central Massachusetts community for nearly 100 years until its state-of-the-art replacement opened in 2006 as the 1,500-student Worchester Technical High School.
| Aug 11, 2010
BIM school, green school: California's newest high-performance school
Nestled deep in the Napa Valley, the city of American Canyon is one of a number of new communities in Northern California that have experienced tremendous growth in the last five years. Located 42 miles northeast of San Francisco, American Canyon had a population of just over 9,000 in 2000; by 2008, that figure stood at 15,276, with 28% of the population under age 18.
| Aug 11, 2010
8 Tips for Converting Remnant Buildings Into Schools
Faced with overcrowded schools and ever-shrinking capital budgets, more and more school districts are turning to the existing building stock for their next school expansion project. Retail malls, big-box stores, warehouses, and even dingy old garages are being transformed into high-performance learning spaces, and at a fraction of the cost and time required to build classrooms from the ground up.
