The Cottage School Gymnasium & Classroom Building Roswell, Georgia • 18,860 sf
Building on its collaboration with The Cottage School, Randall-Paulson’s design for a fourth project on this private middle and high school campus serves the athletic needs of its students. RPA’s design for an 15,100 sf gymnasium will be a multi-use space which includes a game court for basketball and volleyball, 350 spectator seats, a stage for assemblies and performance productions, and two cross courts for PE and sports practice.
The gymnasium and classroom additions to the campus will be built in two phases. Phase 1 provides the gym, permanent stage, lobby, restrooms and locker rooms, weight room, art classroom, and carpentry classroom/scene shop. Phase 2 provides an additional 3,760 sf for six general classrooms for use by both the middle and high school programs.
The Cottage School’s focus on students with learning disabilities and social anxieties has led to a campus with small scale buildings and class sizes to maximize student-teacher interaction. The campus features seven small school buildings, natural woodlands, and open spaces. This close-knit atmosphere posed a challenge for RPA designers when it came to providing on-campus athletic space for indoor sports. Fitting a large building size within a campus of small cottage scale buildings was not easy, but designers were able to place the large mass of the gym behind the cottage scale classroom wing to help reduce its visual impact. The exterior treatment and landscape placement further breaks down the mass of the large scale building. Exterior features, including wood siding in natural colors, help the buildings fit into the wooded, small scale feeling of the existing campus’ other cottage type buildings.
