Saint Martin De Porres High School

The Project

St. Martin de Porres is a private Catholic Charter School located in the City of Cleveland, and 95% of the student population lives at or below the poverty level. We worked closely with the teachers and administration to better understand how we could develop a design to best serve the needs of both the school and the students while promoting learning.

Our Solution

We designed the interior to simultaneously foster individuality and collectivity through the inclusion of areas for individual learning, one-on-one tutoring, small groups, large groups, and entire grade-level collaboration. The variety of areas included in the design are intended to align the physical space with mental learning space. "Campfire spaces" are designed for storytelling and sharing wisdom, while "watering holes" support student-to-student learning, "caves" allow for isolation and focused tasks, and "life spaces" applies knowledge to reinforce understanding of concepts. 

Through a holistic approach to building design interior spaces are designed to anticipate flexibility and accommodate the evolution of education, and energy modeling ensured that the classrooms of tomorrow were wrapped with a high-performance building envelope to maximize the natural environment while minimizing input from fossil fuels.