Intended to enrich and nurture Boston's very youngest learners, and make their initial school experience positive, this compact, 12-classroom school features playful, childlike colors, shapes, and patterns. The transition between home and the school environment is minimized by placing just two pairs of classrooms per floor, creating more intimate surroundings scaled to the young users. Corridors are shorter and narrower, the library, with its low bookcases and tables, feels more like a story nook; the cafeteria is compact; and the multi-purpose room features low benches and windows that bring the large room down to scale. Also, city-mandated wood floors and traditional wood windows in the classrooms add an appropriate homeyness to this small school.

Forced to share an already cramped 3.1-acre parcel occupied by an existing elementary school, the new building sits close to the street, leaving a generous neighborhood playground.
The simple block masonry and detailed brick skin mirror the rhythm and scale of the surrounding residential streetscape of brick townhouses, and the bas relief panels along the façade continue a transportation theme established by the neighboring school.