Our first stop was the new Middletown Middle High School, designed in partnership with DBVW Architects. One of the first combined public schools for grades 6-12 in Rhode Island, the 212,000 sf facility will bring all secondary education under one roof and serve as a civic center for the Middletown community when it opens in fall 2027.

With the building fully framed and masonry going up, we could visualize the school’s organization and picture how the spaces will come to life. Our tour began in the heart of the school, where we explored the cafeteria, gymnasium, and multipurpose performance venue. These shared spaces form a public-facing core that will serve students during the school day and the broader community after hours. Dedicated middle and high school wings flank the central core, separating the two schools while maximizing opportunities to share resources.

As we continued through the academic wings, we learned more about key design features including multi-story lightwells and the distinctive striped masonry patterns inspired by Middletown’s maritime heritage. We also visited the advanced manufacturing lab, which will support career technical programs tied to local industries such as welding for shipbuilding.

After lunch at a local park, we continued to Taunton, MA, to visit the Bristol-Plymouth Regional Technical School, which will welcome students this fall. The new career technical school contains shops, labs, and other specialized environments for 22 CTE programs, each designed to simulate professional settings and support hands-on, experiential learning.

Our tour followed a loop through the school’s concentric rings of learning spaces. Traditional academic classrooms line the expansive central courtyard, while career technical spaces are located along the school’s exterior, providing direct access to outdoor workyards. CTE programs are further organized into career clusters, or groupings of programs in related industries, to promote interdisciplinary project work.

Public-facing programs including Culinary Arts, Cosmetology, Graphic Design, and Early Childhood Education make up the service cluster along the school’s southern façade, where their location supports community access. Programs such as CAD/CAM and Robotics & Engineering Technology are part of the manufacturing and engineering cluster. These programs occupy large first-floor spaces that accommodate the specialized equipment and technology needed for activities ranging from drafting and 3D modeling to laser cutting and operating CNC machinery.

Highlights of the tour included a professional-quality dental suite, a vibrant early childhood education center with an observation lab and multipurpose activity space, and the student activity hub comprised of a light-filled dining space, media center, auditorium, and gymnasium.

Daylighting is a defining feature of this career technical school, and it was rewarding to see our design strategies come to life in the new building. Double-height corridors frame views of the surrounding site, while strategically placed skylights, borrowed lights in theory classrooms, and curtainwall bring natural light deep into the building.

Shops for programs including Automotive Technology, Plumbing, and Electrical Technology feature garage door openings and double clerestory windows that provide diffuse daylight throughout these large-scale spaces. Exposed mechanical systems and structural elements reinforce the hands-on, technical nature of the learning environment while making the building itself part of the educational experience.

As the work progressed, HMFH-ers were invited to develop a “personal credo,” i.e., a guiding principle to shape how they interact with others.

Sharing these credos in an all-office meeting prompted discussion and a new idea: to create an office-wide credo to reflect shared values and define a collective purpose.

Result: Defined personal credos and a common goal to formalize an office-wide credo to guide behavior and reflect firm culture.

• Emerging professionals are actively involved in the design process from feasibility through closeout, at projects of all scales
• Annual comprehensive reviews
• Real-time feedback training to encourage a culture of open communication
• Specific roles on project teams such as our newly implemented Sustainability Advocate role encourage emerging professionals to take on additional responsibility and work closely with the firm Sustainability Leaders
• Open and inviting firm atmosphere in which leadership is involved and accessible in the daily office operations

For our first stop of the day, we donned hard hats and safety vests to walk through Bristol-Plymouth, a 420,000 sf regional career technical school that is well into construction. We toured spaces for the school’s 22 CTE programs, getting a firsthand look at the various shops and labs taking shape, from the Community Health suite which will house a mock ambulance for hands-on EMT and paramedic training, to double-height shops and adjacent theory classrooms for Plumbing and HVAC.

As we proceeded through the student activity hub, the construction administration team highlighted interesting design elements including the different types of skylights. The cafeteria features organically shaped skylights designed to resemble pulleys, while geometric skylights illuminate the primary circulation zones. Second floor corridors open to the floor below, allowing natural light to permeate through the building and create a bright and welcoming environment.

Our tour followed a loop around the school’s central courtyard, ending at what will be one of two green roofs, a vantage point that offered an excellent view of the courtyard construction activity. The versatile courtyard space will be used for outdoor dining, socializing, and large-scale project work including the development of Bristol-Plymouth’s model house, a collaborative effort between the construction-focused CTE programs.

After lunch in a local park, we bused back toward the city to tour the new Arlington High School, an occupied, four phase construction project that took place over four years. Having visited Arlington High School at various stages of construction during previous bus tours in 2022 and 2023 made it even more exciting to see these state-of-the-art learning spaces now completed and the final site work wrapping up.

As our bus approached the school, we were immediately struck by the number of students enjoying the school’s new entry plaza and green along Massachusetts Avenue. Brick detailing along the façade, curtain wall at the main entrance, and a series of columns designed as an homage to the original Arlington High School create a welcoming entrance and public space for students and the community alike.

We entered the school’s central ‘spine’ which houses public spaces like the forum step, café, and performance venues, and is the nexus between four programmatic wings for STEAM, humanities, performing arts, and athletics. As the organizing concept for the school, the spine not only serves as a functional solution to the 25’ grade change on site but also links the entrance and tree-lined green off Massachusetts Avenue with the athletic fields and Minuteman Bikeway at the lower entrance.

One of the most remarkable design elements is the school’s monumental lightwells which bring natural light deep into the five-story building while creating visual connections between floors. With counter-height workspace on the perimeter of the lightwells, they also offer coveted casual study spaces for students. They even provide acoustic benefits with colored felt baffles that create a pop of color where the lightwell meets the ceiling.

Our bus tour ended as we all reflected on the rewarding feeling of seeing projects come to fruition—the result of a truly collaborative process between client, consultants, design team, and the community each of our projects serves.

Now in the final stages of construction, the grade 6-12 Josiah Quincy Upper School will open to students for the 2024-2025 school year, bringing expanded educational opportunities with spacious, light-filled learning and common areas and a coveted rooftop green space that supports student well-being. Public-facing amenities near the ground level, including a cafeteria, media center, gymnasium, auditorium, and black box theater, will make this school a valuable resource for the entire Chinatown community.

Everyone was thrilled to see our design solutions come to fruition, from the accessible green roof, which is the school’s primary outdoor space, to the cantilevered auditorium and gymnasium that define prominent public programs along the façade.

Next, we made our way to the 116 Norfolk Street: Supportive Housing project, a renovation and addition to a 1907 building in the heart of Cambridge, MA, just a stone’s throw away from HMFH’s office. As one of the first developments under Cambridge’s new Affordable Housing Overlay (AHO) zoning ordinance, 116 Norfolk expands affordable housing with 62 units for seniors and previously unhoused people.

We toured light-filled common areas in the vestibule between the existing building and addition, as well as different units, which all feature tall ceilings and windows to create a bright and welcoming interior environment.

Philip “Pip” Lewis grew up in Detroit, and between his home city, visits to relatives in Chicago, and weekend trips to Toronto, by junior high he’d developed a strong interest in the built environment.

“We went to Expo 67, and I saw the fantastic pavilions that were there—the Russian pavilion, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat,” Lewis says. “I got really excited about architecture and design.” At Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, he took advantage of the school’s architecture curriculum, taking classes in drafting and construction.

After completing his master’s degree at MIT in 1981, Lewis was hired as “a junior drafter” at Cambridge’s HMFH Architects. He’s now a principal at the firm, where he’s spent his entire 42-year career. “It’s a very good, comfortable, family-like organization to be in,” he says. “That’s why myself and actually a lot of people have been there for a number of years.”

Part of what makes HMFH’s practice rewarding for Lewis is its focus on designing public and charter schools around New England. “I’ve always said I’m so glad I do schools, rather than luxury condominiums or shopping centers or something like that,” he says. “You always have to go and engage with the community you’re going to build a project in. And it’s so nice engaging with the community to build a school, because in general the communities want the school. It’s not like when they’re out to stop the strip mall that’s going to get built.”

With many stakeholders, not to mention the vagaries of local politics, school projects can take years to come to fruition. One of HMFH’s latest projects is the Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. It’s the first permanent home for the school, which was established as a pilot program in 1997 and serves a diverse population. “The school is something like 94% minority,” says Lewis, who’s been attached to the project since 2011; it’s on track to open for the 2024–25 school year.

“We went through four mayors and something like six superintendents of schools to get this project up and running,” Lewis says. Massachusetts’ complicated funding formulas for school construction were a factor, but finding the right site was also a challenge. “We looked at 40 different sites over the years. We had three different false starts where we did a whole schematic design package: traffic studies, zoning issues, hundreds of pages of documents,” only to fall through for various reasons.

“I saw it as an injustice going on, that this minority school was promised something years ago and wasn’t really getting it,” Lewis says. “You found you really had to be an advocate for the school. You had to push.”

The eventual location for the new JQUS facility is on “a tiny site” surrounded by office towers. “It’s less than an acre, an impossibly small site to build a high school on.” It’s also right next to the Massachusetts Turnpike. “Communities of color are always located in the areas that have the worst air quality, and this was no exception.”

By building up seven stories, Lewis and his colleagues were able to incorporate amenities JQUS had previously been missing—including a library, science labs, and a full-size gymnasium—while also addressing environmental challenges. “We’re going to bring fresh air in from as far away from the traffic as we could,” Lewis says. “All the classroom spaces in the building get their air from above the rooftop, facing away from the source of the pollutants,” before passing through MERV 14 filters.

While the school’s small footprint left no room for ground-level outdoor space, HMFH advocated for an 18,000-square-foot open-air garden on the building’s rooftop. “It’s an educational space, an informal socializing space, and also a therapeutic space when kids are in crisis,” Lewis says.

For the JQUS project, one of Lewis’s most anticipated moments will come when the school opens this fall: seeing students encounter “this wonderful new environment, and just seeing the joy and awe in their faces—that’s always been the most rewarding thing.”