Edison Language Academy

This pre-K through 5th grade dual lan­guage im­mer­sion pub­lic school in Santa Mon­ica has grown since its found­ing in 1985. In the unique dual im­mer­sion pro­gram chil­dren learn to un­der­stand, speak, read and write in both Eng­lish and Span­ish. As en­roll­ment in­creased portable class­rooms were added to the site. In 2008 the dis­trict de­cided to com­pletely re­con­fig­ure the school through a phased con­struc­tion sched­ule. A new two story K-5 build­ing along Vir­ginia Av­enue will be built first en­abling most of the ex­ist­ing build­ings to re­main in op­er­a­tion through­out the school year. In phase 2 all mod­u­lar and ex­ist­ing class­rooms will be de­mol­ished and re­placed with per­ma­nent class­rooms.
The ex­ist­ing school sits on a 5.5 acre site south of the 10 free­way and bor­dered by Vir­ginia Av­enue and Kansas Av­enue in Santa Mon­ica. The pro­ject con­sists of a new 27 class­room kinder­garten through fifth grade fa­cil­ity for a to­tal of 470 stu­dents. Fa­cil­i­ties in­clude 35,000 sf of class­rooms and 22,000 sf of ad­min­is­tra­tion, li­brary, and cafe­to­rium. The school is or­ga­nized around a se­ries of small and large court­yards that can be used as teach­ing spaces, for com­mu­nity gath­er­ings
school per­for­mances, and snack time. The aca­d­e­mic court­yard is the largest of these open spaces and is flanked by two lev­els of class­rooms con­nected by a se­ries of bridges and land­scaped plat­forms. The new school acts as a global cit­i­zen to en­hance and re­store the ecol­ogy and the nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment of the re­gion. Through the sen­si­tive de­sign, we have re­claimed over 5 acres for­merly com­pletely cov­ered with pave­ment and build­ings. The class­room build­ings are now of a higher den­sity and the site is planted with more fields, gar­dens, court­yards, and green roofs. Large glaz­ing sys­tems on a min­i­mum of two sur­faces per­mit nat­ural day­light to off­set ar­ti­fi­cial light­ing and re­duce in­ter­nal elec­tri­cal loads. Air from the court­yard will be pulled through the class­rooms via op­er­a­ble win­dows and dis­charged to the out­side as it heats up and moves through so­lar chim­neys that link both lev­els of the two story build­ing. Dur­ing the day class­rooms are nat­u­rally ven­ti­lated for cross breeze through spaces to re­duce the op­er­at­ing hours of me­chan­i­cal sys­tems. At night the class­rooms are cooled by flush­ing warm in­te­rior air through the flues with cool exterior­ air.