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          The renovated Watkins Elementary School,
          with FoodPrints garden in the foreground.







































            Refresher Course
            Refresher Course



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            Three Public Schools from the 1960s and ’70s
            Are Renovated for Today’s Students                                                    by Ronald O’Rourke


        As Baby Boomers and Generation X gradually make room in  Project: Watkins Elementary School Renovation,
        American society for younger cohorts, so, too, are schools originally
                                                                 420 12th Street, SE, Washington, DC
        built for Boomers and Gen Xers being updated to meet the needs
        of today’s students. The three school-renovation projects reviewed  Architects: Perkins Eastman DC
        here—two located in Washington, DC, the other in Reston, Virginia—  Landscape Architects/Civil Engineers: AMT LLC
        all reworked school buildings originally built in the 1960s and 1970s.  Structural Engineers: SK&A Structural Engineers
                                                                 MEP Engineers: EMx Corporation
        Although the projects differ in their specifics, a common thread
                                                                 Acoustical Consultants: Cerami & Associates
        running through them is the introduction of more transparency  AV/IT/Security Consultants: Educational Systems Planning
        and natural light into closed-off buildings with sun-deprived  Food Service Consultants: Nyikos Associates
        interior spaces.                                         Contractor: MCN Build
        Watkins Elementary School                               completed in 1963 as a three-story structure, and had a fourth
                                                                story added in 1966.
        The Capitol Hill Cluster is a DC public school for pre-kindergarten          Over the next half century, the school became progressively
        through 8th grade students that is divided among three campuses in  more cramped and outdated. Perkins Eastman DC was hired to
        the Capitol Hill neighborhood. One of those is Watkins Elementary  renovate the building and improve its relationship to an adjacent
        School, located on 12th Street, SE, between D and E streets, which  DC Parks and Recreation facility and playing field.
        serves about 440 students from grades 1 through 5. Known more          “Based upon our analysis of the school, the education
        formally as Catherine R. Watkins Elementary, the school was originally  specifications, and its site, there were three overarching goals for


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