Alki Elementary School

The 79,000 SF new construction at Alki Elementary School is designed to create an environment that communicates care, support, and belonging in ways students can easily recognize – beginning with the design of a three-story classroom building that prioritizes connection to an existing and reimagined Parkway Boulevard, an existing Community Center and the surrounding neighborhood.

The decision to use mass timber at Alki Elementary is a purposeful strategy to build social, educational, and environmental equity. Mass timber also creates a strong connection to place while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting biophilia and a sense of welcoming, and offering many constructibility advantages.

Learning communities are clustered together into neighborhoods and distributed throughout the three floors of the building. The design prioritizes classroom location to orient towards the north and south for daylight and leverages views to the park to the north. Learning communities provide access to small group rooms and open learning commons’ to invite collaboration and intervention work. These shared spaces become an important integral part of the framework to support diverse ways of learning.