Seneca Valley School District, Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School / CannonDesign

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Ehrman Crest is a building that redefines learning and makes it possible everywhere-in classrooms, yes, but also in the school’s corridors, outdoor spaces, group learning areas, along peg walls, via environmental graphics, and beyond. As children would experience in a museum, Ehrman Crest simultaneously supports multiple learning modalities (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic). The school is infused with both digital and analog media and experiences. The spaces emphasize and celebrate the process just as much as the product.To explore a non-traditional school model, we needed to embrace ideas from new places. As a result, we partnered with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to design a school infused with children’s museum principles. Could a school be as exciting to students as a children’s museum? Could it give them agency to map the course of their own educational journey? We believed the partnership would empower us to create a space more compelling, joyful, exciting, and successful for students.Other important features include a solar array, a sundial window, exposed walls to highlight building material assemblies, flooring materials to emphasize units of measure, and so much more that turns the school into a seemingly ever-evolving space that supports all different types of learning.Text description provided by the architects.Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School is a learning space that dares to explore what can happen when learning spaces are designed more like children’s museums. The result is an entirely new type of school that activates learning everywhere and gives students unparalleled agency to curate their educational journey. From the genesis of this project, Seneca Valley School District set out to explore if PK12 environments could become more compelling, relevant, engaging, and successful if they emulated children’s museums. The hope was this emulation would create a more rewarding and empowered learning experience for students. There was clear recognition this would require a departure from traditional school buildings that are often designed in ways that dictate learning.At Ehrman Crest, students learn through individual instruction and group experiences. Each grade level is structured in communities including classrooms, a collaborative area, and small-group instruction rooms. This format caters to the varied academic and emotional needs of students by creating adjacent spaces for teachers and students to engage in one-on-one instruction and for students to work in groups. Even the youngest learners-kindergarteners have access to these resources with custom features like floor-level windows that allow them to see activity outside their room.The school offers fluid programming and experiences that allow students to develop critical thinking throughout the building. Students embark on academic and physical journeys through a series of porous environments—a room, collaboration space, work-in-progress area, or the outdoors—to exercise choice in truly unique ways.