Belmont Hill School, Gerald R. Jordan Athletic Center

The trustees of this 75-year-old private boys school wanted to provide their institution, home of one of New England’s most renowned prep-school athletic programs, with modern facilities.
With a student body of 425 participating in 16 sports throughout the academic year, as well as the school’s extensive summer and sport camp recreation activities, this new complex will be used throughout the year. Existing gym and rink buildings were more than 30 years old, and provided inadequate and unattractive playing and support venues for school athletic events.
The solution for accommodating a complex of this size was to partially bury much of the structure in the hillside adjacent to nearby homes while masking the larger volumes with smaller elements more in scale with the setting. As a result, the most “heroic” profile of the new complex now faces the open acreage of the campus playing fields, while the adjacent houses view building pieces whose roof shapes, heights and pitches are in keeping with residential scale.

“A good solution for a complex project.”–2002 Jury

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