Community Information Center

The Community Information Center is for an upcoming Nursery – 12 Grade School in San Jose is a 10,000 sqft adaptive reuse project that converts half of the ground floor of a three story existing commercial office building to a reception/lounge, an 80 person presentation room, meeting rooms, interview rooms and staff offices.

The existing office building is part of a small office park, surrounded by a parking lot.

The project establishes a new building entrance through the existing redwood trees, by creating concrete portals which carefully frame the view of the visitors away from the parking lot and direct them towards the trees.

Arranged in a L-shaped formation in plan, and a perfect 9’ square in elevation profile, the geometric rigor of the entry portals transforms the visitor from the banal parking lot context to an art installation like spatial experience.

The interior of the project is conceived as an open plan, defined by European Oak floors and acoustic ceiling fins stretching the entire space, creating visual continuity across.

The entry to the presentation room is through an orange threshold portal, accented by a cove light marking the edge of the frame.

The window scrim is activated by projections in the presentation room and by the printed mission statement in the lounge.

The frameless fabric scrim is stretched at the inside of the exterior windows to both diffuse the light and to block the views of the parking lot, creating a museum-like spatial quality. By blurring the standard exterior mullion module, the scrim further accentuates the scalelessness and the abstraction desired for the open plan.

The Early Learning Center testing room is enclosed by a corner of glass, allowing parents visual access as children engage with testing.

The staff workroom has both views and accessibility to a garden and patio.