2025 East Best Projects
Award of Merit, K-12 Education: Hackley School, Center for the Creative Arts and Technology
Hackley School, Center for the Creative Arts and Technology
Tarrytown, N.Y.
Award of Merit
Submitted by Consigli Construction Co.
Owner/Developer: Hackley School
Lead Designer: Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects
Construction Manager: Consigli Construction Co.
Structural Engineer: Silman Structural Solutions (TyLin Group)
Civil Engineer: Kimley Horn Engineering and Landscape Architecture of New York
MEP Engineer: Kohler Ronan LLC
The 50,000-sq-ft facility features a 550-seat auditorium, a 100-seat black box theater, rehearsal and instructional spaces, flexible computer science classrooms and the school’s first art gallery.
It also includes a senior painting studio, digital media labs and a soaring atrium that connects all levels. To prepare the challenging site for construction, crews spent nearly a year excavating more than 15,000 cu yd of granite to carve the building’s bowl-shaped footprint.
More than 300 rock nails were installed to stabilize the site, while a critical sewer line serving the entire campus was relocated in stages. As the foundation walls were not designed to withstand lateral loads, the team needed to source a lightweight fiberglass aggregate for backfill, shipped from multiple states as suppliers phased out production mid-project.
The building’s structural system, which includes three massive cantilevers and unique curvature, required 700 tons of steel—more than double the typical tonnage for a building of this size.
