First Class

by Alison Stewart

  “The whole history resonated with us,” said Patrick Williams of Moody-Nolan. “One of the things we pride ourselves on in the firm is what we call ‘responsive architecture’ to come up with solutions early on in the process.” Williams, who has been working on K-12 architecture in the District for fifteen years, sees this moment as one that will restore some faith. “I think it is actually really accomplishing something that, quite frankly, a lot of people—a lot of students, teachers, and even a lot of alumni—probably thought this would never happen in their lifetime.”

  The team of Perkins Eastman/Moody-Nolan was chosen after a yearlong contest. When the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization (OPEFM) announced that any interested firm could submit a proposal, there was only one requirement: Capture the soul of the 1916 building. In the two-pronged process firms first had to submit a narrative, a vision of the work that was proposed. The next phase was to submit a design.

  The OPEFM was created in 2007, specifically to address the enormous structural problems in the city’s schools. At the time there were four thousand open and unresolved work orders involving thirty-three schools. Before there could be any discussions about designing new campuses, the schools needed to be stabilized so they would be safe. Once that was accomplished, the next phase was the progressive modernization of the middle and elementary schools. On the high school level, the projects would be singular, wholesale, onetime events.

  The entire district-wide overhaul, funded by bonds and taxes, could take as long as ten years. As for the budget, the numbers fluctuate, much to the chagrin of the city council, but the bill in the end will be close to $2.5 billion.3 Roughly $122 million of those funds have been allocated for Dunbar III.

  Building the new Dunbar is an enticing venture, but certainly one with strings attached. So many different groups feel ownership of the school. The reality of the situation—attempting to please alumni, the current administration, teachers, parents, students, and government agencies, all while respecting the history of the school—would be tricky. For all involved, there seemed to be a tacit agreement not to screw it up this time. Most people felt that Dunbar II had evolved into the equivalent of an educational Death Star.

  About the only people in the process who had somewhat kind things to say about the sprawling structure were the architects working on Dunbar III. Partially out of professional courtesy and intellectual objectivity, Sean O’Donnell, another Perkins Eastman principal, can articulate what was supposed to have been advantageous about the 1977 building. A soft-spoken, bespectacled man with a sense of architectural history, O’Donnell knows how to get beyond the visceral reaction most people have to Dunbar II.

  “It was part of the modern movement of doing things differently in some ways, and created a new architecture for a new age. And I think we’ve learned a lot about scale and context and things since then. We’re trying to celebrate the urban environment more than those buildings were trying to refute the urban fabric.” Indeed, the external problems of DC had informed how the schools were built.

  “I think there was also an introversion of those open school environments, that it was, you know, let’s focus on what we’re doing here internally and not recognizing the sort of powerful connection that the environment has.” O’Donnell is very excited about the opportunity to introduce light into the school life of Dunbar students. He points to entire walls of glass that will illuminate the halls during the day, and be a visual invitation into the school for the community. “The idea of glass and transparency, openness and sort of an opposition to the ’77 building, which was doing that [concrete] for maybe the right reasons. It was trying to be energy efficient, but we’ve learned a lot about how to do energy-efficient buildings without removing all the windows since then.”

  As part of the strategy to help maintain the building, the team decided to go for LEED platinum status. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification is based on the number and effectiveness of environmentally advanced applications in a design. The more applications, the more points, and number of points determines the building’s silver, gold, or platinum status. For example, Dunbar III will feature geothermal heating as well as water-collecting units to support reusing rainwater in the building systems. The new school will also use high-end, more expensive materials that last longer, such as terrazzo flooring for the high-traffic areas.

  But before any earth was moved, or pen was even put to paper, the architects from both Perkins Eastman and Moody-Nolan went straight to the source to find out what made Dunbar meaningful to the students who had gone there. They interviewed alumni who told them stories about dances in the armory, lunches eaten on the steps, and the watchful eyes of the teachers down the corridors. “We looked at the history of the building. We looked at the yearbooks, and we started with the people, first and foremost,” says David Shirey, the project designer.

  He recently oversaw another DC modernization project that added a new two-story, 43,000-square-foot addition to a 1932-era, 17,900-square-foot elementary school. He has been working closely with all of the different communities concerned with construction. He goes to the school regularly to participate in the monthly update meetings in Dunbar’s library. The meetings provide an opportunity to air concerns and ask questions. Shirey takes notes when the coaches say they want to make sure the sports fields will be a certain way. He responds to a community leader who reports that dust is making its way into the homes surrounding the site.

  Shirey says many of the design elements arose from stakeholders’ feedback. “So, in looking at the project, we started with the people, and we started with the academic history, and then the cultural history, and that very quickly brought us back to the architectural history of the armory, of the way the school was sited on First Street.” The armory, at the top of the gorgeous staircase, was the entryway to Dunbar in all ways. It was where social functions were held. It was where you met your friends. It was where class pictures were taken. It was the heart of the school, with all the arteries running to it and through it.

  “There was that formality of entrance and formality of the building wrapping the athletic and the private, semipublic spaces on the back side. So we tried to take that, those elements and those ideas, and look at how best we could site the building. A lot of it really built off that plan. In fact, we had them here. One of the things, I grabbed a set of drawings, and I know this doesn’t work very well for audio …” Shirey finds what he was looking for and explains that the new school will return to the 1916 school’s footprint. Dunbar III will go back to the site of Dunbar I.

  In the 1970s, to accommodate the new sports field, Dunbar II was pushed two streets over and dropped right in the middle of the neighborhood. Patrick Williams describes it this way: “It was like a stake was just planted down.” The new building will not only return to the old location, it will also be reminiscent of the 1916 building. “The academic wing on this side, and the administration wing on this side. In some ways, you can almost think of them as this miniature campus of three buildings.”

  Because urban schools can’t sprawl like suburban schools, designers have to build up. As they learned from Dunbar II, however, an immense multiramp tower is not the solution. “You have the four-story classrooms. We have the pool, the gym, and the theater. The arts wing. We have the administration and then, just like the section of the 1916 building that [rose] above the entry, … the library. We’ve done the same thing on the second floor and put the media center in the library, right on the corner of First and N Street. We are defining these different zones of the more civic-minded, the pure academic classroom laboratories, and then the administration and the media center. We create this distinction because [we] assume [students don’t spend] an entire day in the classroom. They’re going to have electives. They’re going to be engaged in arts in some fashion. They’re going to be engaged in physical education. So there’s going to be that transition. So in some ways by using the p
rogram we’re able, we hope, we believe, to create that sort of, the conditions at least for that kind of interaction again that used to happen in the armory.”

  While at least one critic sniffed that the design was too safe and perhaps too reverential, the architects did not make a twin of Dunbar I.4 Dunbar III will have a knock-out sports complex, unlike the 1916 building. The new building also has to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, so there can’t be a grand external staircase. And of course, there is the issue of security. Anyone who enters Dunbar now has to go through a metal detector. “A balance we find ourselves having to negotiate these days are the security aspects of the school,” Shirey says with a sense of determination.

  Concept renderings of the new Dunbar III.

  Perkins Eastman and Moody-Nolan

  It’s a problem they want to solve. The plan for the new school is a mix of preventative and passive measures. “And so how can we do that? How can we create the idea of passive security that … when you walk through there’s not a sense of, ‘I’m being watched all the time.’ And quite frankly, if we can kind of remove that idea, then you can remove one-half of what some folks call ‘the prison mentality.’ When people feel they’re being watched, they respond one way. When people feel that they have to watch someone else all the time from a position of authority, they respond in a different way.”

  Shirey points to a walkway bridge that goes across the main open atrium. “How can we maintain safety? And how can we maintain those sight lines? Well, when you’re seeing the folks, and you’re engaging the administration on a regular basis, we think there’s a benefit to it. Provided it’s not in a punitive side, right? So that’s part of why we have the assistant principals on each floor. And they have a glass wall that looks down the corridor. So when the students are coming through, it’s not a surprising thing to interact with the assistant principal on a regular basis.” Shirey points to a walkway, a bridge that spans the new armory and points to one of the sight lines they’ve created. “You walk by, you can wave. You see, it’s not the only time that you engage with the administration, when there’s a problem. So hopefully that also can help foster that sense of community between the students and the authority to where the idea of going to an authority is not only when there’s a problem. Or only if there’s a problem for the students.”

  “There will be metal detectors built into the architecture,” Patrick Williams notes. But, he explains, with the right budget and design, the detectors can be fairly undetectable if placed in the surrounding support walls. “There are new, streamlined ways we can do this; we integrated them in the curtain wall system actually and aligned it with the main wall. Visually with the rhythm of the curtain wall.”

  The entrance of Dunbar III—a large, welcoming plaza—will face O Street, which will be reopened. On the outside of the building, the school’s name will be displayed on a singular tower, harkening back to the original two towers that flanked the entrance of Dunbar I. A funny thing happened over time as well. The name of the school changed a bit. It has always officially been Dunbar High School. When the 1977 building went up, the exterior read DUNBAR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL. Lately, its banners and letterhead referred to it as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. On the recent plans, displayed on a tall brick tower are big, bold letters that read vertically: D U N B A R.

  Paul Laurence Dunbar will get his due. His likeness and his poem “Keep A-Pluggin’ Away” will be embedded on a wall directly facing the entrance. The history of the school will be built into the building so it won’t be forgotten and can’t be discarded. The great heroes of Dunbar will never have their pictures placed in crooked plastic frames again. Their accomplishments will be displayed on stainless steel plaques integrated into the architecture.

  “Throughout the building, we have about 220 of these,” Shirey says of the plaques that will be in the floors. “There have been so many incredibly successful people that have come through this institution, not necessarily this building, this institution of Dunbar, frankly…. The fact that there are six Dunbar graduates that are on stamps. There is a level of record that was demanded that is hard to meet.”

  Shirey points out that the wall of superstars, eighteen plaques in the Armory below Dunbar’s image, is meant to be an aspirational tool. A plaque is reserved for someone who had made a grand contribution. “Not just ‘Congratulations, someone’s the valedictorian,’ and now you get permanently remembered. There’s a level of success, the bar being that high. It helps define what the expectations can be, and then here are the resources to help achieve it, to help achieve these expectations.”

  Not all the plaques will be filled when the school opens. “You’ll notice there are two kinds of plaques. There’s the one identifying folks who have achieved, but frankly, the bulk of the plaques, maybe two-thirds, 60 percent, we want to make blank. ’Cause I want the students to come through these spaces every day. They’re walking down the arts corridor, and there’s blanks in the arts corridor. You know, they’re walking down the civic, or in front of the theater, or in front of the gym, and there’s blanks in front of the athletic corridor there in front of the gym. You know, you want them to walk by and say, ‘See that one there? That’s me. In a few years that’s gonna be me.’ ”

  There’s a real romance attached to the building of this new school. The architects are into it. The students are into it. The administration is into it. There’s so much hope pinned on this one building. Sean O’Donnell and his team are aware of the expectations. “We want to create a center of community here that’s open and inviting, and you know, it becomes maybe a place [where] Dunbar grows back to the prominence that it had. There’s this administrative transition that’s occurring now, and so with the architecture, maybe there’s the opportunity to reconceive of the place in its entirety. And I’m not party to what’s happening with the administrative side, but hopefully this is the opportunity again for Dunbar to reassert itself, in DC certainly, and put it back up to even the regional stage that it used to be on.”

  There was a moment of candor from one of the architects. The new building has a bridge, a walkway over the armory. When asked about kids who might throw projectiles—or each other—over the side, Matthew Bell looks over his glasses and answers, “To a certain extent, the architecture can only solve so many of those problems.”

  17 BACK TO THE FUTURE

  It would be a great fallacy to give segregation credit for the lucky combination of events which produced Dunbar. The school didn’t want to be segregated, and one can easily imagine conditions that would have maintained its traditions to the present day. The Dunbar experience does show that all the talk about racially balanced classrooms, or innovative curricula, or that matter of racial limits on intelligence is simply beside the point. Education is an art influenced less by the criteria of social science than by the self confidence of the teacher and the eagerness of their pupils.

  —Wall Street Journal, June 30, 1975

  A building can only do so much. The architect was correct.

  The English Teacher

  Matthew Stuart is writing on the chalkboard in his room, #702. It’s near the top of one of the towers. The little bit of natural light comes in from a series of small rectangular windows about ten inches wide that are close to the ceiling. He is getting ready to continue a classroom discussion of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. He wants his students to explore the thesis that the individual can be programmed to lose all desire for self-realization if a higher power has all the control.

  Slowly students amble in, all wearing the correct uniforms but with disregard for the school’s no-cell phone policy. It is a twelfth grade class full of seniors who will be graduating with the class of 2012, hopefully. Well, the class isn’t actually full. Only fourteen of the thirty-eight students have shown up.

  “Good morning,” says Mr. Stuart. Most of the students respond. One boy is in a conversation that is loud enough for all of his fellow students to hear. And th
at may be the point. “I feel so bad it was Mother’s Day, and I didn’t have anything for my moms—anything. She got me an iPhone.” He smiles a smile that revealed he wasn’t actually that concerned, but now everyone knows he has an iPhone. Mr. Stuart sees a chance to engage the kid.

  “Well, you could have given her a gift that didn’t cost any money, like cleaning your room,” Stuart offers.

  “Whaaat?” another student butts in, not really understanding the idea of an act being a gift.

  Stuart tries another route. “Or you could pick her some flowers.”

  “Ain’t no flowers growing in the ghetto,” responds a thin, sweet-looking kid with shoulder-length braids who simultaneously slammed his body into a chair while dropping his backpack on the floor with a thud.

  “Just dandelions,” chimes in his friend. Mr. Stuart smiles. At least the kids heard him.

  Stuart stands before them, an even-tempered, nice-looking twenty-something white guy wearing a tie and slacks. In a few weeks he will be getting married. But before then he has to get his students ready for their final exams. From 11:40 AM to 1:00 PM he really digs into the concepts at hand while slowly pulling the students along.

  “What is collectivism?” he asks. When no one responds, he calls on kids individually and through a series of questions helps them get closer to the answer. He refers to his students as “ladies and gentlemen” when he wants their attention. He asks two young men to take turns reading a passage out loud. A girl in the corner wants to know what the word “transgression” means.