Making Orca's Entry A Little More Ideal

Chris Alexander's classic A Pattern Language has this to say about building entrances:

The entrance must be placed in such a way that people who approach the building see the entrance or some hint of where the entrance is, as soon as they see the building itself... Place the main entrance of the building at a point where it can be seen immediately from the main avenues of approach and give it a bold, visible shape which stands out in front of the building.

That way, Alexander points out, you don't have people wandering around the outside the building wondering how they are meant to get in. Here's an example of a well-placed, highly visible entrance: I'm willing to bet that not many people, even out-of-towners, stand flummoxed in front of the Met, unable to find the front door.



It helps to have grand marble steps and Greek columns, of course, but it's also possible to make an entrance plenty obvious with just a little extra lumber. Here is the old Ballard High School, just to pick a random example:

It's not that complicated, really. So why do building so often fail at this most basic task of letting us know how to get inside? Sometimes it's a problem with the original design. But more often it's because our usage patterns change, and buildings (particularly those built of stone, brick or cinderblock) are difficult to adapt. We once spent a weekend in Vancouver, watching out our hotel window as people tried to get into the Vancouver Art Gallery:

Up the sweeping staircase they would go, past the grand columns, and up to the massive, locked, front doors... Sorry, you can't get in here, folks -- please go around the corner to our new main entrance.  Gotcha!

Something similar happened to Whitworth School when Orca moved in three years ago. The building  was never much to look at ("designed by prison architects," according to neighborhood lore) but it did have a fairly obvious "main" entrance on 46th Ave. This entry was dreadful in its own right -- opening into a disorienting holding pen far from the office, classrooms, or any space occupied by a live human being who might have greeted you or made sure you weren't an ax murderer -- but at least you could find it without too much trouble.

Then Orca built our Greenhouse/Science Annex on 46th Avenue, blocking the view of the "main" entrance from the North. At the same time, the school shifted most of its traffic around the corner to Dawson Street. The 46th Ave entrance is still there, still visible from the South, still unmonitored and ungreetable, but considerably more attractive now than when we moved in, thanks to garden art installations headed up by Lily (Yay, Lily!). But Dawson Street is where the buses drop kids off in the morning and pick them up at the end of the day. The playground is on Dawson, so it's where kids hang out before the morning bell and after school gets out. Parents tend to congregate there too: if you're going to hang around chatting, it's nice for the kids to be busy traversing the monkey bars rather than hanging off your arm asking "Can we go?" every thirty seconds. Plus, the North entrance lands you on the second floor, where most of the classrooms and the main office are located. So the North entry -- originally designed as a fire exit -- has become the functional "front door" of our school.

The problem is, it's really hard to find your way inside the building from Dawson Street. There's that rusty little triangle-roofed structure that tells you where the doors are, sure. But in order to reach those doors, you have to walk half-way down the block to the bottom of the ramp (see arrow) and then back up.

This is confusing and inconvenient at the best of times, but at 2:45 pm, when buses are loading and teachers in orange vests are shouting out instructions, and kids are pouring down the ramp while parents push their strollers up against the tide, it's downright exasperating. Plus, the whole thing is butt ugly -- all chain link and guard rails, with a random retaining wall at the bottom of the ramp and a muddy slope beyond.

Why does this bother me so much? Well, mostly because I agree with Chris Alexander that "the experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building." More generally, I believe space matters, that the buildings and rooms we inhabit affect the way we feel, the way we work, the way we relate to one another & the rest of the world. As Alain Botton puts it, "we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places," just as we behave differently when we are wearing sweatpants versus a ballgown. A well designed building, Botton goes on,  can "render vivid to us who we might ideally be."

Ideally, Orca's building would render vivid to us the welcoming, inclusive, creative, progressive educational community envisioned by our mission statement. Our alternative program relies heavily on community collaborations and family involvement. But the school's forbidding and confusing entrances, narrow hallways and confined stairways, and dearth of common space make it really hard for parents and other visitors to come inside, hang out, get involved, and feel at home. It affects the kids too: last year a kindergartner we know drew this picture of his new school:

It does bear an uncanny resemblance to the state prison at Monroe, doesn't it? Yep, same architects...

Regular readers will be familiar with -- and probably weary of -- these complaints: apologies to those of you who have heard me rant about this for the last three years! You'll be glad to hear that I'm bringing it up again now not just to whine or rage against the bureaucracy that built this building and stuck us here, but rather to champion an idea that might actually make things (as Josie says) a little more ideal.

The proposal, developed by an Orca mom (an architect) with input from teachers, parents, neighbors, the school district, and SDOT, draws on one of Chris Alexander's other design tenets: Entrance Transitions.

Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.

Elizabeth's concept is to turn the bottom of the ramp into the beginning of a welcoming entry sequence. What if we took out that triangular retaing wall and made that muddy slope into a little curved seating area? What if we replaced that rickety, hardly-used bike rack with a proudly vertical, boldly visible indication that This Is The Entrance -- an archway, a totem pole, a pillar of some kind? What if we created a series of swirly spirals etched in the sidewalk, or painted on the pavement... What if the spirals flowed out into the street so that the whole intersection became one big public plaza, connecting Orca to the neighborhood and welcoming children, families, visitors, and neighbors to our school?

Well, that's the idea. The Department of Neighborhoods liked it enough to give us $7400 to get started this summer. Here's the latest iteration of the plan:

It's still evolving, so feel free to contribute ideas or suggestions!