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Fuller Middle School - Cafeteria / Learning Commons
For over 2000 years, architects and builders have used atriums (or atria if you prefer) as integral and highly functional parts of buildings. In ancient Rome, atriums were used to provide daylight and ventilation, and in some cases included a shallow pool for collecting rainwater. Modern buildings don’t need to rely on atriums for ventilation or water collection, but still rely on them to provide natural light to parts of the building that would otherwise require artificial lighting. Such is the case with the new Fuller Middle School where the glass roof over the Cafeteria / Learning Commons will provide bountiful amounts of natural light, in particular to the north-facing rear half of the building.
In addition to providing daylighting, the central Cafeteria / Learning Commons will serve several other key functions in our new middle school:
- Visible learning - Modern educational practices like STEM and STEAM involve both the process (students at work) and outcomes (completed project work) being highly visible. The design of the new Fuller Middle School supports these goals by providing visibility from the open central core into the classrooms (although privacy shades will be installed throughout the interior of the school) and by providing common spaces on each floor that can be used for student breakout work sessions or exhibitions of learning.
- Connections within each grade and to the rest of the school - In the current Fuller building the three grades physically overlap each other and students spend the entire day criss-crossing throughout the whole building. The new design is organized more strategically to support students and staff as each grade will have its own floor, and kids will have a close visual and physical connection to the rest of their cohort because the space is open in the middle. To a lesser but still important degree, kids will also have a sense as to how their cohort fits into the broader school community because they’ll be able to observe students on the other floors. For many students transitioning from an elementary school to a larger building this “sense of community” is vitally important.
- Safety and security - Because of the sightlines across and between floors, administration and staff members will have an unprecedented ability to see and monitor what’s going on in the building - unlike most of our schools where perpendicular hallways and cement block walls create blind spots throughout the building.
Compared to other schools in the district which were built decades ago using the design and construction techniques of their time, the overall design of the new Fuller Middle is quite different which not surprisingly has led to some questions being voiced in our community. Many of these questions are based on strongly-held misconceptions, and include:
- Noise - For many, when you think of an atrium what comes to mind is the loud “click-clack” of heels on a hard tile floor and from there you can easily imagine the shouts of children echoing throughout the building. In the case of the new Fuller Middle School, materials with appropriate acoustical properties will be used throughout the building in order to control sound transmission. Additionally, interior doors will be gasketed to control sound leaking into the classrooms.
- Heating and Cooling - Some residents have asked if the open core of the building will place undue burden on the heating and cooling systems. If this building was built using technology from 60 years ago (when the current building was built) that would certainly be the case, but through the strategic placement of HVAC intakes and outlets as well as the use of modern glazing (glass) systems that will not be an issue. On a more general but related note, the heating system in the current building actually runs much harder than it should because there is no insulation in the walls (that’s right - zero insulation in the current Fuller) and most of the windows are single-pane Plexiglas.
- Wasted Space - At least one critic has suggested that the open core of the two upper floors in the new Fuller Middle School design is “wasted space” and that it should be filled in to create additional classrooms or other academic spaces. That critique is simply not accurate. If we were to do this, we would lose out on all of the benefits noted above. We would also be forced by the MSBA (Massachusetts School Building Authority, our partner in this project who is allocating approximately $40 million for it) to eliminate space elsewhere in the building since we are limited in the overall square footage that we can build.
For more information or to submit questions to the team, check out www.fullerbuildingproject.com where you can find FAQ documents, previous presentations and meeting materials, and a link for submitting feedback or questions.
