High Rise Education

Manhattan has one of highest population and school densities the world, as a result many educational facilities have become outdated and overpopulated. The New York City Department of Education has accrued a large debt attempting to update facilities to current educational standards. Large portions of land has been designated to traditional educational buildings with the potential to be a source of a large profit. The combination of an elementary school and an existing high rise facility would allow for the selling of their current property to fund the construction of a new high quality educational environments. The thesis designed a prototypical solution to an elementary school in Manhattan and the school’s simplistic programmatic layout allows for its implementation within typical high rise buildings. The feasibility study of this project placed a school, based on averages for all Manhattan elementary schools, in a tower high rise in Midtown Manhattan in the center of the city block. The end result was a replica-table elementary school that could easily be placed into many high rise buildings within Manhattan.