Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
EskewDumezRipple, together with Marlon Blackwell Architects and landscape architects Andropogon Associates, came together as a design team latching onto the idea of the “urban pastoral,” where the school would seamlessly marry a modern notion of urban development as a catalyst for energizing cities and historical respect for agricultural elements from the region.
The Thaden School Master Plan won a recent 2021 Green Good Design® Award from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum.
This new Master Plan shaped a new high school’s campus at the heart of a growing city integrating the student experience of learning by doing while connecting them to the land and community.
The campus design places sustainability central to students’ education. This begins with a landscape that acts as a botanical textbook filled with a diversity of plants, flowers, and trees from Arkansas.
The campus is a microcosm of the region’s native plant communities – tallgrass prairie, oak and pecan woodlands, bottomland hardwood forests, and freshwater wetlands.
It supports natural ecological processes, restoration of the Osage Prairie, pollinators, and models of production and consumption through farming.
Key component of the developed grounds involved an “urban agriculture” program, intended to support the school’s signature “Meals” program. Fruit and vegetable fields, orchards, planter boxes, and a working greenhouse can all be found dotted across the campus.
Beyond guiding ecological processes, the campus similarly guides the flow of water. Stormwater management (91% of stormwater managed onsite) is accomplished via a distributed strategy, with several detention areas across the site.
The stormwater facilities are also used as teaching devices integrated into the curricula, with the hopes of not only inspiring students but the broader community.
In this vein, an ever-present “water lab” detains a large percentage of rainwater onsite while simultaneously providing students with a unique opportunity to learn via their surroundings.
The master plan helped the school prioritize what to build first, identify opportunities for growth and intensification of their site while simultaneously establishing an environmental trajectory in delivering buildings that use 70% less energy than typical schools.
Designed to achieve an EUI of 23 kBTU/SF*/yr, the school is Zero Energy Ready (ZER), meaning that it could likely achieve Zero Energy (ZE) status with the addition of cost-effective rooftop photovoltaic arrays.
Alongside typical school bulletin boards, buildings have integrated tracking dashboards that enable students to monitor their consumption of energy, food, and water in ways that will help them appreciate the global impact of local behavior.
The project strives to establish an innovative vision for the future while reflecting the rich, pastoral heritage of the surrounding landscape.
EskewDumeRipple “Thaden School Master Plan”
Project: Thaden School Master Plan
Architects: EskewDumeRipple
Associate Archtects: Marlon Blackwell Architects
Client: Thaden School, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA
Landscape Architects: Andropogon Associates, Ltd.
Photographers: Timothy Hursley / Philip Thomas
