If you went to Lowell High School in 1950’s, you may fondly remember going to sock hops in the old gymnasium and being a classmate of Stephen Breyer (Class of 1955) who is now a Justice of the US Supreme Court. Lowell High School was later moved to a new location in 1962 and the school buildings became part of the City College of San Francisco system and is now called the John Adams Campus.
Linda Squires Grohe is Dean of the School of Health and Physical Education at John Adams and was particularly interested in reclaiming the gymnasium back to its former use as a physical education facility. She also needed more classrooms for her programs. The building needed structural work to meet current earthquake standards. To strengthen the building, we worked with our structural consultant Tennebaum Manheim Engineers to incorporate shear walls in existing window openings.
Because we knew that this building was important to many San Franciscans, we didn’t want the new shear walls to look awkward with the old building. We looked at a number of cosmetic solutions, including such things a reinstalling the old metal windows with translucent glass in front of the concrete wall, creating some kind of design in the concrete and simply covering the concrete with stucco. After these early investigations, we came up with a tile design that we think actually looks like it could have been there originally. Let us know what you think.
Click here to see a description and photos of the rest of the project.
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