Entry number: UB07053
Project Name: Clark County School District Career and Technical Academy
Location: N/A (this project is a prototype)
Building Type: Educational
Completion Date: Summer 2009
Architect: Welles Pugsley Architects


Sustainability Description

Design Team:
Architect: Welles Puglsey Architects
Electrical Engineer: TJK Consulting Engineers
Structural Engineer: Mendenhall Smith
Landscape Architect: Hill Clark & Associates
Civil Engineer: CivilWorksInc

Narrative/Project Description:
The primary objectives of the project ors to promote a sense of' community within the school and to foster relationships with industry partners. These relationships ran provide the student a clear career path early on in what sometimes, seems to be a difficult and cloudy choice. The Design Team in association with the Clark County School District arranged workshops with Business and Industry partners to collaborate on current and future requirements of career and technical education. The results of the workshops provided the Design Team with the Insight to develop a program 'of academies focusing on specific vocations. Similar in theory to small learning communities, the individual, buildings are designed to take full advantage of "project based" learning which the District plans to implement.  Students will remain within their academy a majority of file day with the exception of Lunch and Physical Education, whereby providing, a college type atmosphere.

Within each academy an interior corridor is the forum for gathering, sharing, and encouraging communication. From the corridor, views into the classrooms and lab spaces make learning visible while reinforcing connections and excitement to the specific industry vocation. The need for larger instructional spaces prompted the Design Team to provide a theoretical teaching space directly adjacent and open to the practical "hands on" lab areas. Multipurpose classrooms augment the academy for Math, English, History and Science by providing instructional space to complete the "project based" learning environment. Centralized work areas for teachers afford them the opportunity to collaborate on curriculum integration in addition to providing a sense of community.

The growth in the Clark County School District is projected to increase rapidly over the next several years. Encouraged by the ever changing "hot" industries the design of the specialized lab spaces can adapt and vary with the educational challenges of the community thereby providing the district with options to meet future needs today. The flexibility of individual building prototypes provides a "menu" of programs which can be tailored to specific region of the valley, again giving a variety of choices.

Sustainability Description:
During the initial stages of schematic design, the Team was tasked to provide a building not necessarily to break records but one that made energy sense. Therefore, the use of several practical yet fundamental strategies was employed. Building geometry and an east, west axis of orientation was taken advantage of because of the hot, dry climate found in Las Vegas. Glazing was kept to a strict minimum on the both the east & west elevations to reduce the heat loads created by the intensity and constant sunlight.

With the abundance of natural and free sunlight, light shelves on the exterior of the walls were designed to bounce the suns rays as far back into the spaces as possible. Solar tubes were designed to add to the light shelf's ability to provide natural light in rear of the spaces. The Design Team's objective was to provide 25 foot candles of natural daylighting whereby drastically reducing the need for artificial light. In addition to the light shelf, a sun shade directly above the window is used to prevent both direct sunlight as well as heat gain from entering the building. By reducing the amount of sunlight that enters the spaces, one can directly reduce the amount of glare, thus providing a more comfortable teaching environment. Daylighting windows on the north elevations compared to those found on the south are larger, allowing for more natural sunlight.

The design ideas used up to this point seem to be almost common sense. Therefore the use of the geothermal energy seemed to be the next logical step. As a result of the Team’s decision to develop separate buildings, individually controlled heat pumps were designed for each room per building. With a central closed loop system, which is fed from the well field, a building has the ability to add or remove energy from the system and in turn, transfer it to the next if needed. This balancing of buildings provides versatility and greater control of the interior climate.