Sustainability by Values with Monique DeVane

SH: Core values often associated with sustainability.

MD: Exactly. The values that guide our approach are adjacent to sustainability. So when we start with our purpose, then build out the values that animate that purpose, the result is often less wasteful, more flexible, and healthier. In terms of our campus, this means taking something that’s often a limiter, its size and setting for instance, and reinterpreting this constraint as an advantage. 

Our open-air tradition requires a conscious balance between buildings and nature. We have to be deliberate in recognizing the natural environment is the soul of our campus, not its trimming. Likewise, the idea of simplicity asks us to build and operate modestly, to prioritize connection and creativity. Rather than overshadow kids with edifice, we create simple, indoor-outdoor spaces, because we live in a place where that’s possible, and it turns out to be community building and healthy as well.

SH: When I first toured the campus, the relationship to the landscape was palpable. Our buildings wiggle the way they do because they align with the site typography so we could reduce the amount of excavation and strengthen the relationship with the natural environment but that’s really part of the campus’s DNA, something cultivated over time.

MD: We have evolved opportunistically to make the most of our site while also staying in balance with its limitations, and frankly, with our limitations. We started in the 1970s with decommissioned portables purchased from the Oakland Unified School District. For a long time, we didn’t have any big, south-facing buildings. When we finally got one of those, we put photovoltaics on it. But we’re always considering our students.

The important question is, how much is enough? A school that’s overbuilt has a certain kind of fancy sterility, like the living room that you only use on special days. That’s not where the kids live. Kids really need spaces they can own. That’s the feeling that runs through the program and is expressed through the physical spaces. When we have assembly, kids aren’t clearing their announcements through a grown up before they talk, they just talk. And by talking they learn how to speak before a group, how to recover gracefully from a mistake, and how to listen to each other. Then that muscle makes them better lifelong learners and better citizens.

SH: The teachers and students were really our partners in the design of the classrooms, including outdoor spaces and relationships between the two. It was a great collaboration; from your perspective, what factors set the stage for our success.

MD: A collaborative design process works best when the client is engaged, but aware of what they don’t know. At the same time, instead of dismissing our sometimes harebrained aspirations, the design team was able to hear the underlying need or intent, even though we might not have had the right words to explain what we we’re asking for. You really met us where we were at.