River Oaks Baptist School (ROBS), an independent PK-8 school, dreamed of a facility that was driven by student empowered and self-directed learning, with an interdisciplinary STEAM focus. Collaboration was to be a hallmark, impacting all ways teaching and learning occurred. This facility was to provide for a slight increase in enrollment and age specific design, while also reinforcing the school wide community.

The move away from locker-lined corridors of identical classrooms, each with a primary teaching wall and matching furniture, seemed obvious. The decision to move toward identifiable grade-level learning communities, with various classroom sizes and shapes, a grade-level Learning Commons that could hold the entire grade level, with flexible spaces of differing sizes (meeting rooms, lounge spaces and shared equipment) in between, was less obvious.

Acquisition of adjacent land allowed for a second access point to the campus. Increasing parking by placing a garage underground allowed for increased usable outdoor space. The tight site required a four-story middle school, featuring a grade-level Learning Community and STEAM programming on each floor.

The new metal clad building appears to twist out of the existing brick campus as each subsequent floor rotates to expose a roof garden at each level. These dynamic outdoor learning spaces offer a connection to the outside from all classrooms. Each level has a “hearth” for gatherings, commons areas, science labs, collaboration spaces, and classrooms of varying sizes and shapes. The building is grounded by a robotics and computer lab, an indoor/outdoor middle school maker space, and fine arts spaces (a Blue Box theatre, music and visual arts classrooms) that are stacked on three floors. The library, which flows throughout the building, creates the library of the future by reinforcing hands-on projects, design thinking, brainstorming, and exploration that happens in every corner of this facility.

Adjacent to the middle school, the Sarofim Leadership Center was designed to bridge between the existing River Oaks Baptist School campus and the new Mosing Middle School, creating a new front door for the campus, and providing administration and collaboration spaces.