Faced with the discovery of a high-pressure regional gas line below its historic school, SUSD determined to move to an adjacent site. 

While economically constrained, this move provided the opportunity to integrate academic studies with supplementary curricula that tied this community - many of whom are farm laborers - to its historic agricultural roots.

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Anchoring the school is a grange hall and adjacent gardens, where students and teachers will be able to develop a direct, tangible link between food growing, the classroom, the kitchen, and the dining hall.

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The budget demanded the simplest of stick-built, plaster, asphalt shingle construction; and the limited site size also required a highly compact, classically deployed campus footprint in order to accomodate state-mandated play area and the targeted farm/garden area.

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At the same time, each classroom has a skylit, open gable ceiling, with rough-hewn timber trusses.  This conventional, repeated section for almost all the buildings achieves a liberation of overhead space and an homage to the agricultural architecture that remains the prevalent typology on surrounding lands.

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