Yuba River Charter School

Design Team: EDesignC (MEP, FA, FP Engineers), Cornerstone Structural Engineering Group, McProud and Associates Landscape Architecture, Giuliani & Kull Civil Engineers

450 Architects worked with Yuba River Charter School (YRCS) to find a permanent home because the school had moved from lease to lease since opening in 1994. YRCS is recognized as a pioneering model for pubalic Waldorf schools in the United States, and is one of the first to align its curriculum to California standards. The K-8 curriculum used by YRCS provides a child development model that nurtures the head, heart, and hands of each student. Central to the curriculum is a reverence and celebration of nature, and attunement of children with the food-to-table process.

The design team reviewed potential sites for a new campus. To create a design that achieved the vision and goals of the school and community, architects held public meetings to gather ideas to incorporate into the design. The new campus is set within a beautiful, quiet, natural habitat of towering ponderosa pines and cedars in Nevada County. The buildings themselves embrace the bowl-shaped contours of the site; kindergarten is on one end, administration and commons building in the middle, and classrooms along the western flank. They create a campus that sits within the natural landscape and features a prominent cedar at its heart. Future gardens and sports facilities will lie at the base of the hill.

The buildings were oriented for the best sun exposure, and photovoltaic array cost analysis was conducted to determine the best approach to power generation. The roofs were designed to be solar-ready, and overhangs provide passive solar control. The building orientations, window sizes, and skylights reduce daytime lighting demands. Passive cooling is achieved through window placement to maximize cross ventilation. To address the site’s natural slopes, bioswales were planted to manage surface runoff. The school also undertook the remediation of a brownfield site at the entrance to the campus as part of this project.

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