Award of Merit: K-12 Education
South Shore Educational Collaborative, Hingham, Mass.
The South Shore Educational Collaborative needed a new facility to meet the demands of increasing enrollment. The school provides specialized education, counseling and therapeutic services for students with moderate to intense learning, emotional, physical and medical challenges.
Over the course of a year, the project team renovated a 60,000-sq-ft industrial warehouse and, to incorporate all of the features that the school requested, built an additional 26,000 sq ft.
The renovation of the warehouse and the additional construction were executed as a single project. To move the two parts of the project along, the existing warehouse was cleaned out and prepped for finished work as the additional shell was being built. That allowed all subsequent work, including exterior skin and interior finishes, to be done concurrently.
The project also included reorienting the building so that staff and students could enter from a residential neighborhood road and not through the industrial park surrounding the warehouse.
Reorienting the building had its own set of challenges, however. They included working around a 30-ft elevation difference between the school's entrance and the road; tackling water mitigation and sediment runoff; and modifying the site design to comply with the town's drainage requirements.
The judges commended the project's team for the way it reoriented the building and also took note of the complicated phasing.
Key Players
Owner/Developer FoxRock Properties
General Contractor/Construction Manager Bowdoin Construction
Lead Design Firm Roth & Seelen Architects
