Exterior View

Site Plan

School Administration Building
Lexington, Massachusetts

This historic house in the center of Lexington, MA, is badly in need of renovations and structural repair. Our approach has been to preserve the original 1840's house, to remove subsequent additions, and to add new space that will allow the town's School Administration to effectively serve its community. The result is a 13,000 sf, fully-functioning contemporary office building that is appropriate to its historic context in the center of town.

On the interior, clarified circulation and the use of internal windows and glass walls fosters collaborative interaction among school departments. The building also contains a large public room that can be secured from the rest of the facility in off hours and can thus be used by the community. For the exterior, we developed a landscape and traffic plan that not only respects the house's proportions and origins, but also drastically reduces the amount of paved area, thus knitting the building back into its previously fragmented site.

© 2003 Handlin, Garrahan, Zachos and Associates