Golden Bridges School
San Francisco, CA
The site is an hourglass of land tucked behind the rear yards of surrounding residences. The entry is on Cotter Street, set back and expanding the street into a public plaza and drop-off area. The façade is a sloped green wall, a hill, behind which the school is arranged as a series of detached structures in the landscape, perforated with open courts and strung along a walkway in the form of a golden bridge. On one side of the bridge are classrooms, and on the other are common spaces arranged on two discreet levels. At the center is a large multi-purpose room which opens to courts on three sides. This is the heart, a space both open and closed, where the golden bridge intersects on both levels as a walkway and gallery. All the roofs are green and all the vertical walls are gardens. The courts are landscaped and plated with trees. The school buildings occupy the front part of the site; behind the landscape is a shifting gradient transforming from cultivated orchards to gridded beds to natural shrubbery to primal grasslands and ponds. This building and landscape are about teaching the values of Waldorf Education, not just about making spaces for teaching, but the presence and material, the object and land itself, becoming part of the pedagogy. This building is an educational instrument, a landscape of leaning. Waldorf Schools have a long tradition of beautiful architecture, and in our time, that means architecture which connects nature and humanity, grows out of the site, is the site. It is as much about the buildings’ presence as it is about their absence – a porous and open field of spaces to shelter and expose, to gather and disperse, to contain and to liberate. This is a building that is integrated with nature, working in harmony with nature – absorbing sunlight, collecting rainwater, growing and changing with the seasons, a building that is alive, a building that is a garden. This is a world where the imagination and common sense of children can be nurtured and grow, where their creative and analytical abilities can flourish, where the artistic and intellectual can merge, where students, teachers and staff can be part of a learning community that teaches to become unique and civil members of society.