Final Updates
June 6, 2007
David Bushnell (right) and Caspar Mol
This will be my final report on the West Portal high school project, which should be completed by the time we send out the first Announcements of the 2007-2008 school year. Already much of the sheetrock is in place, so as you walk through the building, you no longer have to imagine how the rooms will feel. The library space is especially wonderful, with its central location on the upper classroom floor. When we first thought about starting a high school, 12 years ago, we planned that the library would be the “cultural center” of the school. And now the new library, with its bank of windows and its placement outside the three science labs, promises to be that center we had hoped for. It may not have all of its shelving as we begin the school year, but it will be beautiful!
Every time I write to you about the new high school building, I am picturing the Core Group, composed of the indefatigable members of our Board of Trustees. The Core Group begins our Saturday morning meetings with a tour to note the progress made since our last meeting. Leading those tours are the two community members who have been most instrumental in procuring, designing, and developing the West Portal site: Architect David Bushnell and Project Manager Caspar Mol.
Mr. Bushnell, principal of 450 architects, and father of two SFWS students, is married to our beloved third grade teacher, Laurence Jaquet. He describes his architectural design studio as “committed to community-based, environmentally conscious design that is beautiful and soulful.” It is no wonder, then, that we asked David to work with us when we found the building at 470 West Portal and decided that we needed to build it to be not only beautiful, but also as “green” as possible. Our high school is not the first green school he has designed; he won the “Top Ten Green Buildings of 2003” award from the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment for his work on the Argonne Child Development Center of the San Francisco Unified School District.
Mr. Bushnell has practiced architecture in San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Switzerland for over 20 years. Prior to founding 450 architects, David was responsible for the design and construction administration of a variety of projects, including James Lick Middle School in San Francisco, Queens Borough Public Library and Nassau Community College (New York), commercial office buildings, the Hawaii Convention Center, and several housing projects in Switzerland. In addition to his architectural practice, Mr. Bushnell is involved with advocating sustainable design, has served as a visiting critic and lecturer at several universities, and has taught design at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
The high school faculty is particularly pleased to be working with David Bushnell because of his dedication to a design process based on consensus-building. As he says, “We believe it’s our responsibility to include community in that process. We… translate the ideas and concerns of a variety of stakeholders—from wanting open space to dealing with tight budgets—into successful design features in harmony with the overall goals of a project. Our most successful projects invariably arise from this kind of spirited collaboration.”
Caspar Mol, Trustee, is also a Waldorf school parent, with three children in the school. His biography includes some fascinating elements, which he can narrate for you: “I grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria, first in Bukumbi (where my dad built a hospital), then in Kampala and went to primary school in Butare - Rwanda and Brazzaville - Congo, and to secondary school in Kinshasa - Zaire, Oak Park - Illinois, USA, Nairobi at Lenana (Eliot), and Zeist -The Netherlands.
“I first wanted to become a doctor, but then settled on architecture. I studied Architectural Engineering at Delft University of Technology in Holland. As part of the curriculum, we had to do two internships. I did one in Bangkok and one in San Francisco.
“After graduation, I worked a year in Rotterdam but didn’t find it very interesting. I decided to look up my internship firm in San Francisco and returned in ‘85 for what was meant to be a 6-month stint. That became a year, after which my then girlfriend joined me. She also found a job here, and slowly we settled in.” Here he and Liesbeth Heikens remain, as dear members of our SFWS community.
Mr. Mol now has his own firm, specializing in custom homes, high-density housing, real estate development and bridges. You might have heard of him as one of the two architects of the winning design entry for the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Caspar has devoted unbelievably long hours to the school, from developing an enormous spreadsheet for 15-year financial projections to actually identifying the West Portal building, to overseeing every detail of the construction phase. Even so, he has continued his own design and development work, for which he was just recognized with the 2007 AIA Honor Award in Regional and Urban Design for his work on the Carneros Inn in Napa. If we weren’t planning to put solar panels on the roof at West Portal, perhaps we could simply tap into some of Caspar’s limitless energy!
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development
May 3, 2007
The interior framing will soon be covered by sheetrock
Currently the big push is to enclose the walls with sheetrock. We are awaiting the delivery of the classroom doors in order to complete that task. The last of the wiring and plumbing that must be enclosed within the walls is quickly being installed, even as the walls begin to go up. There is a great complex of hidden pipe and wire behind every wall! Some of it is for the highly developed technology of our alarm system. The San Francisco Fire Department came in to consult on that with David Bushnell, our architect, and Caspar Mol, Project Manager. They decided to install the best quality equipment to handle this life/safety issue. We may not have ceilings when we move in, but we will be secure if a disaster occurs! That seems to me to be the correct prioritizing.
Decisions large and small need to be made every day. I was happy to hear about the one decision that meant we would have separate thermostats for every classroom. The cabinetry in the kitchenette will be bamboo with black trespa tops. Or will we go with the lighter color? One exciting detail has to do with the furnishings of the science labs. There will be group desks set up to conduct experiments, each with a burner and sink (set at the ADA=approved height for accessibility). The spacious lab rooms will each be furnished and arranged to best house the subject, whether life sciences, physics, or chemistry, and they have been designed in consultation with our beloved science teachers, so that each room will be uniquely theirs.
One last note on this aspect: We have not burdened our lean budget with any other furniture or fixtures than those I just mentioned. But, we won’t have a barren high school by any means. Last week, some of us visited the downtown offices of the school’s law firm to view the furniture they were giving away as they move to a new office building. We signed up for library and storage shelving, some beautiful cushioned chairs, many tables and filing cabinets, a couple of seminar-room tables, and a terrific suite of furniture for a conference room. It will be a bit eclectic in style once we move all of this into our completed building, but it will be home.
Now all we need is to have the work completed “on schedule and under budget…”
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development
February 28, 2007
Last Saturday, there was a meeting of the Core Group at the new high school site on West Portal Avenue. The Core Group is a committee of the Board of Trustees, dedicated to seeing our exciting building project through to the opening of the high school —and beyond. Last weekend, the committee members who gathered were: Renée Jordan, Board President; Deborah Kuschner, Board Treasurer; Paul Hurley, Board Secretary; Lynn St. Albus, Board Vice-President; John Burket, Second Vice-President; Caspar Mol, Project Manager; David Bushnell, Project Architect; Dave Alsop, Development Director; and your reporter, Joan Caldarera, Head of Administration.
We toured a completely transformed space—clear of all fixtures, minus walls that had once been there, and with a large rubble-filled pit, waiting to become the elevator shaft. On the northern end, windows had been cut into the concrete to bring natural light onto the future weavery. Now they were boarded up, awaiting our decision as to what kind of window frame we would choose: will the windows be only for light or will they open, the more expensive, but preferred choice?
Every day, Mr. Mol and Mr. Bushnell are faced with such choices, though at this point many of the design and construction choices are concerned with details of the infrastructure, things that will never be seen. But, they are all important: What technologies shall we wire for now? Where shall we make future plumbing possible? How to accommodate the hallway width required by law and still have room for lockers? (Well, this last one is not exactly invisible infrastructure, but I wanted to let you know that we will have lockers. Our students will be most pleased about that, and the teachers won’t have to step over backpacks quite so often!)
The Core Group is kept aware of the options and often advises on the decisions. Sometimes a decision is large enough to require consent of the full Board of Trustees. In fact, that was the case with the question of the windows. We really wanted to have windows that open, for the quality of life inside the space, and for the energy savings in our “green” building. But to replace all of the existing windows required agreement of the full Board that we could raise the necessary extra funds (some $400,000). The Trustees did agree to that at the Board meeting on Monday night. Perhaps they could all imagine how beautiful the finished project will be, with windows that open out above the lush greenery outside the science labs. Maybe they shared my pride in our commitment to the LEED certification of our building (the first such in the city, remember!) There is something so right about this project for our school, and you can sense it even in its dust-filled state at the moment. I can’t wait until we can clean it up enough to invite you all back in for another peek. I’m sure you will be as excited and optimistic as the Core Group and the Board are now.
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development
January 24, 2007
“The first LEED-certified high school in San Francisco.” This phrase, used to describe our emerging high school building on West Portal Avenue still gives me goose bumps every time I hear it. It is so exciting to think that we have made a commitment as an organization to doing all we can to remain environment-friendly as we build out our new site. The fact that we are re-using an existing building gives us a big leg up on the LEED certification scale. But what is LEED certification?
In the United States and in a number of other countries around the world, LEED certification is the recognized standard for measuring building sustainability. Achieving LEED certification demonstrates that our building project is truly “green.” LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and its Green Building Rating System is the accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings.
The LEED rating system was developed and is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council, a Washington D.C.-based, nonprofit coalition of building industry leaders. Its purpose is to promote design and construction practices that increase profitability while reducing the negative environmental impacts of buildings and improving occupant health and well-being.
The LEED rating system offers four certification levels -- Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum -- that correspond to the number of credits earned in five major areas of human and environmental health: sustainable sites, water savings, energy efficiency and cleanliness of the atmosphere, selection of materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality. LEED standards apply particularly well to existing building renovation, such as our project. Because of the sometimes illogical way the commercial world seems to work, it will actually cost us more to “build green” than it would if we simply took the least expensive route. That means we will have to do two things: reduce the extra niceties we would have preferred to have in our new home and raise more money to help us pay for it.
Even so, our Board of Trustees and Faculty have agreed that it is unconscionable to ignore what we know today about the fragility of our environment and the health risks of not “building green.” Gaining LEED certification will show our community the value we place on caring for our mother Earth, and will remind our students every day to follow our LEED.
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development
January 10, 2007
Our new high school building is getting to that point that comes just before the actual improvements begin, when your wonderful new home doesn’t look very much like the building you thought you bought.
The remediation work is now completed and there are only a few bags of dirt to be hauled away. All the materials from inside the building were removed and recycled: furniture, raised floors, wiring, conduits, bathroom partitions, bathroom fixtures. I wrote before the holidays about how carefully we oversaw that process so that, with proper disposal of all unnecessary materials we could earn credit toward our hoped-for LEED certification.
The new work that has begun is the underpinning for the below-grade elevator shaft. This will allow the elevator to go down to the future arts wing in the open space below the building. This is one of the exciting future growth areas of this new site. Because the building is on a hillside, there is a large area beneath it, on the eucalyptus grove side, that can be developed in the future. We thought arts spaces would fit perfectly there and we have some drawings already of how the addition might look. But, I don’t want to get too far ahead of the story as it now stands.
Back to the work at hand: Demolition of interior partitions, ceilings and unwanted structures is now well under way. Saw cutting of holes in the floor for the elevator shaft is scheduled for next week. That should be noisy and exciting work! I hope we can find a long enough lull in the busy work to have a hard-hat tour of the site for those who missed our open house on November 4. Keep watching this page, and we’ll let you know when that time comes.
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development
December 13, 2006
On Monday the Board of Trustees met in a regular session. Among the many items on the agenda was a report on the progress at 470 West Portal Avenue, the new high school site. It was exciting to hear about the work accomplished so far, such as the careful removal of the leftover equipment that I described in this space last week. Our dreams of becoming a LEED-certified “green building” come closer to reality every time we find someone to take and reuse what we would otherwise simply discard. We learned at the Board meeting that we are quickly collecting the necessary points we need to earn a “gold” certification for an environmentally conscious building. Only “platinum” would be a higher rating, and there are as yet no schools that have earned that.
The Trustees agreed to hire a Project Manager to oversee the construction phase that will be commencing very soon. His name is Bernard Slomovitz, and we are proud to welcome him in this most important position. Mr. Slomovitz, who was born in Albany, New York, earned his degree in Civil Engineering from Clarkson College. He began his career in 1954 with the US Corps of Engineers, and went on from there to participate in nearly every aspect of the building business, from real estate sales to work as a general contractor. Projects he has worked on include Levi’s Plaza, Temple Emanu-El, the Olympic Club, KQED studios, and a number of schools, such as Head Royce in Oakland.
Mr. Slomovitz’s experience, his vast network of professional contacts, and his practical good humor will make him a valuable addition to our team of experts who will bring our new high school into being. I hope to highlight more of them for you as the work continues.
Joan Caldarera, Director of Program Development