High-rise public school set for construction in Boston

The Josiah Quincy Upper School (JQUS), a 650-student public school, is set to rise on a one-acre site in Boston’s dense Chinatown neighborhood. The six-story, 178,000-sf building will house grades 6 through 12.

The HMFH-designed facility will feature healthy spaces that support student success and wellbeing. Among these spaces will be rooftop outdoor classrooms; learning spaces for music, art, and science; advanced art quality systems; a student-grown garden; and a variety of athletic and fitness spaces.

JQUS will be equipped with enhanced air filtering and an innovative fresh air make-up system to ensure clean indoor air quality, which will benefit the school greatly due to the airborne pollution that will migrate from the adjacent I-90 and I-93 highways. Additionally, the entire school will be powered by electricity, including the full-service kitchen. Rooftop photovoltaic arrays will provide 14% of the power needed to operate the school.

The project will be located adjacent to the Josiah Quincy Elementary School and within walking distance to several neighborhoods. IN addition to HMFH, the buuild team includes Turner Construction as the general contractor and Skanska USA Building as the project manager. Construction is slated to being this fall with the new school completing in time for the 2024-2025 school year.

LPA Architects conducted a post-occupancy evaluation, or POE, of the eSTEM Academy, a new high school specializing in health/medical and design/engineering Career Technical Education, in Eastvale, Calif. The POE helped LPA, the Riverside County Office of Education, and the Corona-Norco Unified School District gain a better understanding of which design innovations—such as movable walls, flex furniture, collaborative spaces, indoor-outdoor activity areas, and a student union—enhanced the education program, and how well students and teachers used these innovations.

Resiliency | Jun 24, 2021

Oceanographer John Englander talks resiliency and buildings [new on HorizonTV]

New on HorizonTV, oceanographer John Englander discusses his latest book, which warns that, regardless of resilience efforts, sea levels will rise by meters in the coming decades. Adaptation, he says, is the key to future building design and construction.