On Monday, January 22nd, the community was presented with an update to the Edgewater High School construction. It is still on track to open in January of 2011.
If you are not aware of the changes to the campus, I’ll do my best to describe, in very broad verbal brushstrokes, some of the design highlights. The new main entrance to the school will be at Par Street as shown in the picture below. You can see in this picture, the new auditorium (what I like to think of as the Mark II memorial auditorium) as well as the main entrance. That entrance is to a long corridor that acts as the spine of the main classroom buildings.
As you may be able to see in this view of the buildings, that main spine has various roof elevations along its length. This lets in light and generally gives an open unified feeling to the interior. (Click any of the images for a larger view.)
At the center of these classroom buildings is the Cafeteria Commons. It is designed to be the nexus of the classrooms, a central interior that unifies the various classroom wings.
One of the main topics people at the meeting asked about was the traffic flow. There are three main entrances to the school.
- At the north end of the school is the bus entrance along Maury Road.
- The main entrance will be at Par and will include a traffic light to control traffic flow. This entrance will be for student drop off and pick up, as well as staff parking.
- There will be a new entrance for student parking, along a new road called Eagle Way. This short road will run will be between the current music building and the current administration building, and empties out approximately across from the Laundromat. This new entrance will receive a traffic light to control the flow of traffic, and to provide some traffic calming along the long straight-away of Edgewater.
It’s a very impressive plan, and it’s more impressive that it is all still on schedule. If you are interested in more visuals of the school, see this public presentation from 2008, where the images above came from:
Edgewater COVE Update 11 2008 for portal.