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By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent
Sunday 9/28/2003, Arts/Entertainment section, p. N10

The new Orchard Gardens Pilot School is so striking in appearance that you don’t notice, at first, how intelligently it’s been designed. But this school is a perfect example of the truth that architecture is a lot more than cosmetics. Thoughtful interior planning is what makes it really sing.

Orchard Gardens stands on a tough site. It’s at the corner of two noisy streets, Melnea Cass Boulevard and Albany Street, at the point where the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods meet. The architects respond with an L-shaped building. All the home room classrooms are on the inside of the L, the quiet, protected side, where their windows can look out over a peaceful scene of trees and houses. On the outside of the L, where the city noise is, you get the bus drop-off, the cafeteria, the gymnasium, and special-purpose rooms such as science labs.

Things are just as logical in the vertical dimension. The smallest kids are on the lowest floor.

As a child gets older, he or she rises to the second and finally to the third floor. It’s an architectural metaphor for broadening horizons.

This is a big school, with 750 children, but it doesn’t feel big because it’s divided into three sections. These perform like three small schools, each three stories high and clustered around its own staircase. The sections are called “academies” or “strands,” and they’re color-coded. You can belong, for instance, to the Purple Strand. On the top floor, where the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders are, the strands connect up horizontally to create a sort of one-floor middle school. Everything is as rationally and precisely placed as the pieces of a Rubik’s Cube.

You rarely see a building where the architects seem to have had more fun. Todd Lee of TLCR Architecture was the principal designer, aided by David Lee of Stull & Lee. The outside colors are the colors of a school bus: bright yellow with dark horizontal stripes. The architects worked with members of a community group, who said they didn’t want a “brick box” with an institutional look. They certainly didn’t get one. Besides the bold splash of yellow, a tall red tower at the main corner announces the building with theatrical flair. (A small irony, pointed out by Todd Lee, is that if the building were in Beacon Hill, the neighbors would probably insist on a brick box. The visual imagery goes deeper than it seems. The neighborhood around Orchard Gardens, like much of Boston, is one of great ethnic diversity, with a preponderance of kids of African descent. But, as Todd Lee says, most New England buildings are based on European design traditions. He decided to go to Africa for inspiration instead.

Nearly all the school’s visual motifs are derived from African originals. They become an iconography that communicates cultural messages.

The long main facade on Albany Street, for instance, was suggested by the mosques of Timbuktu, where towers and boldly marked entrances are employed to give large buildings a human scale. The slanted roof overhangs, derived from the meeting houses of Mali, provide a sense of shelter. Windows and doors set deep into the walls, like those of monolithic churches in Ethiopia, make the school feel solid, safe, and durable.

The design for a circle of big columns in the main rotunda, where you first come in, comes from a palace in Dahomey. The architects say the columns “invoke the spirit of elders.” And so on.

The motifs aren’t literal; the school isn’t a game of Trivial Pursuit. But they’re fun to figure out, they add a sense of invention and joy, and they subtly inform the children that there’s more than one tradition of architecture in the world. Todd Lee has already been asked to give a slide lecture on his sources for the children and teachers.

Orchard Gardens is one of three schools to open in Boston this fall - the first new schools here in a generation. It’s an instant landmark in the city. As architecture, it’s creative and delightful, but it’s also lucid and professional. The only problems I could spot are minor. The entrance atrium is too reverberant acoustically, and the afternoon sun can glare in a few locations. The rear of the site is marred by a lot of ugly asphalt, required by the city for fire engine access.

One change would make a real difference. The city should try to find a little more money than the modest $24 million this school cost and use it to plant more trees.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.

This story ran on page N10 of the Boston Sunday Globe on 9/28/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.