Form and Palette Express Function

The School

“Most high schools build a single structure and put all the programs in it,” says Josh Matthews, AIA. He was the project manager for Fayetteville, Ark.- based Marlon Blackwell Architects. “It’s very efficient and has all the parking and landscaping on the interior. Here we wanted the outdoor spaces to be extensions of the building the building envelopes.”

The master plan for the campus was done by Eskew Dumez Ripple, New Orleans. Blackwell designed three buildings including the performing arts center, which is not yet completed. Two buildings, designated “Reels” and “Wheels” work as a pair and house academic facilities. The “Meals” building was designed by Eskew Dumez Ripple.

If those names seem a little different from typical academic buildings, which are often named for large donors, there is a reason for it that gets to the specific pedagogy the Thaden School follows and also explains why they are the first high school with a gravel bike racing team. The school uses three instructional tools that relate to the buildings themselves. At Meals, students learn the culinary arts as well as where food comes from, which can lead to learning about global and societal issues. At Reels, the influence is film, and students study what would be traditionally held in the arts and humanities areas. And at Wheels, faculty calls on the influence of bicycling to gets student’s interest in science.

Reels and Wheels, Form and Texture

The Reels and Wheels buildings function as a pair, complementing each other. “We wanted a degree of maturity but playfulness,” says Matthews. “We had to think about the elegance of the building and give it a soft quality, something that transcends the typical metal building language.”

That begins with the architectural influence for the buildings. “If you fly over Northwest Arkansas, there’s one thing that will pop out immediately,” he says. “You will see the gleaming silver roofs of chicken houses that dot every parcel. The overall building form came from these.”

The influence quickly morphs into a sophisticated form that is defined by undulating roof shapes with intersecting lines and planes. There was an influence for that as well. The Thaden School is named after Louis Thaden, an early American aviator who set numerous flight records and won prestigious races. The roof planes were inspired by the pitch and roll of flight, and the inflection of the roofs created spaces to insert clerestories that allowed light to flood the interior of the buildings.

The roof helps define the form of the building, giving it an eave line that rises and falls and, at times, soar upward in the scooped ends of the buildings. That is accentuated further by façades that recede to focal points or hold a straight line giving greater variation to the pitch and roll.

The standing seam metal roof from Morin Corp., Bristol, Conn., features 2-inch standing seams with 16-inch pans that on some planes run at an angle across the slope, feeding rainwater into an internal gutter system. Viewed from a distance, the low slope with the seams at different angles gives a pleasing texture to the roof, offering greater visual depth.

Morin also supplied the box ribbed wall panels. “We’re always talking about breaking down the scale of the building at different levels,” says Matthews. “There’s the campus scale, which I would say is more of the plan inflection. And there was like the scale of the different kind of smaller landscape areas. Then, at that finer scale, which is the metal panel itself, we studied a lot of different ways to break down the scale.”

Working with four standard profiles and modifying one of them to create a fifth, Blackwell created a nearly endless variety of patterns. “We placed every single panel with no inherent logic,” says Matthews. The modified panel allowed for flexibility to work around external cameras and fire strobe and other mounted items, making them feel more like part of the architecture.

The Harmony of Color

The form and texture of the Reels and Wheels buildings are essential to their architectural intent, but the palette selection is itself a defining aspect. Like the name selection, this wasn’t by accident.

Building on the idea of maturity with playfulness, Matthews says, “It’s like the professional who’s really clean cut during the day, but can still pull his mountain bike out of the truck and go hit the skills track at the end of the day. I think the maturity of the system and the way the building form was really accentuated by the texture; the color became that additional layer. It did a couple of things. First, it gave the school an identity. They didn’t necessarily enter into the world with us saying we really would like a building with kind of crazy colors, but when we started working with our team and seeing how the landscape was shaping up and knowing that if we went with something closer to that pallet these buildings would probably get lost.”

Working with Sherwin-Williams Coil Coatings, Minneapolis, they explored ideas influenced by aviation and settled on the car culture from the 1950s and ‘60s. “If our buildings were cars,” says Matthews, “they would be muscle cars, not Jeeps or Porsches.” The color they finalized is the bright green of the 1967 Mustang Shelby Cobra GT500, an iconic car and color that speaks to the uniqueness of the buildings, the campus and the school itself. The result is bright, playful buildings that are harmonious with the environment.

“There’s probably things that we nerd out on in our office that probably don’t matter to many people,” says Matthews. On this project, those things included the influence of the aviator for whom the school is named and the role of bicycles in the curriculum. Considering the Wright Brothers began careers as bicycle makers and ended as aviation pioneers with the first manned flight, there is a straight-line connection through the architecture of the Reels and Wheels buildings that draws on that foundation.