East Harlem, New York is a community beset by poverty and its attendant ills of early high school withdrawal, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse. The East Harlem School is an independent, not-for-profit, year-round middle school that recruits students from low-income families in the community. The school is committed to maintaining an intimate cohort of students, in which each is recognized as an individual and as a contributor to the community. The new 27,800 SF ground-up building champions the school’s mission and culture of learning and social awareness through spaces suffused with natural light, promoting calm, creativity, and collective responsibility.
The entry lobby, cafeteria, and multi-purpose gymnasium on the lower floors, used for daily school-wide gatherings and public special events, are all linked by light-filled stairs and gentle ramps. On the façade, translucent, acid-etched glass provides a hint of the daily activity of students and teachers to the neighborhood as they come and go. Classrooms reside on the more private upper floors, screened by a fabric-like weave of staggered windows and panels of varying colors and degrees of reflectivity.
The school had an extremely tight budget, caused both by the high cost of construction that plagues inner-city schools and the fact that its site was within the 100-year flood zone. Peter Gluck and Partners acted as both architect and construction manager in an architect-led design-build process, providing a level of intensive quality control and substantial cost savings, which resulted in a building that would otherwise have been out of reach for such a school.
