Marietta High School College & Career Academy

Marietta, Georgia

Firm

Breaux & Associates Architects

Client

Marietta City Schools

Area

55,140 sq.ft.

Total Cost

$12,600,000

Completion Date

12/2019

Karl Moore Photography, Douglas McGukin

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When the Marietta City school system considered new college and career pathways, the businesses, industry, and colleges from the close-knit community partnered to help prepare students to successfully enter the workforce or transition into postsecondary education. From conception, Marietta’s College & Career Academy was centered on a philosophy of flexibility and collaboration. The result is a three-story addition, the College and Career Academy.

The academy surrounds a daylighted atrium with glass walls and skylights. Guests enter the expansive core through the façade, and students circulate over a two-tiered open-air bridge from the adjacent high school. The upper mezzanine is ringed by a wall of interior glazing, emoting a sense of transparency and interaction and creating an impactful, collaborative environment. This mezzanine leads to the roof terrace, offering alfresco study and learning with views of the campus. The dynamic grand staircase draws occupants downward to the atrium floor where a LED monitor wall is the focal point. Below the monitor is a student-run Coffee Bistro Bar. Quartz-topped worktables, designed to cleverly incorporate ducts for the smoke evacuation system, were seamlessly integrated, adding more collaboration areas.

Designed on a grid or bay system, like sub-dividable lease space, the academy provides flexibility in the size and layout of classrooms or labs. With self-contained lighting, power and HVAC, and marker-surface stud-framed demising walls, spaces can be adjusted in size and function. Chuck Gardner, Marietta’s chief operating officer, says: “The addition enhances the academic experience of students by providing a technology rich, collaborative, and modular design that is highly adaptive. The job market students are entering is rapidly changing, and this design allows for us to be responsive to those changes and adequately prepare our students.”