Detroit Country Day School, Lower School Expansion
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
The Detroit Country Day Lower School provides an innovative learning environment for students from first through fourth grades. This project focuses on imaginative theming unique to each classroom wing and shared learning spaces intent on making students feel at home and giving them ownership over their space.
Featuring bright colors, room entrances that look like colorful houses, cloud fixtures hanging from the ceiling, and even grass-like seating areas, the building brings the outdoors inside to give students their own world to inhabit. The individual classrooms are spacious, each more than 1,000 square feet and serving small class sizes of about 20 students. These large spaces include flexible furniture and integrated technology so that educators can transform the classrooms to meet their needs.
The feeling of community extends beyond the individual classrooms to the school’s shared spaces. The communal media center, maker space, and tinker labs augment the classroom learning environment, offering more hands-on, interactive opportunities to work with one another daily.
This renovation replaces an aging elementary building and connects to existing campus facilities. “The Hamlet” houses the Detroit Country Day Early Childhood Center and also features indoor Victorian-style cottages as the entrance to each individual classroom, a project conceptualized and created with TMP Architecture in 2000.
Additional Information
Capacity
540
Featured in
2020 Architectural Portfolio
Interior category
Pre-K/Early Childhood Education
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