Ember High School

The new Ember Charter High School is located in a converted manufacturing warehouse in DUMBO / Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. Ember will occupy two full floors totaling 18,000 square feet of this long vacant warehouse with additional future expansion potential, building out a flexible design with new energy efficient mechanical systems and providing much needed civic infrastructure for the community. Ember’s highly innovative curriculum inspired a design centered around the entrepreneurial students and greater Ember community. The openness of the warehouse space allows the entrepreneurs and their community to take center stage, maintained with a light and flexible renovation footprint and sustainable technologies both passive and efficient.

At the center of each floor is a large multi-purpose common space with flexible furnishing, surrounded by a loop of service spaces such as break-out and meeting rooms, a variety of more intimate sitting areas, work stations, pantries and egress. Along the exterior perimeter of each floor, outside of the loop, are classrooms, conference rooms and administrative work spaces. The flexibility and minimal footprint of partitions in the loop and between rooms allows for a wide variety of group sizes and activities from the most private to opening much of the space for large events, workshops and seminars. The floor and ceiling of the warehouse space are maintained in and outside of the loop. The loop is made up of semi-movable, translucent polycarbonate partitions, to allow light to permeate throughout the space from virtually every window into the central common space while providing limited privacy and shading, as well as allow for flexibility in room size and enclosure, such that the common space and some or all perimeter rooms can be combined. The loop ceiling houses - in a tight wrapper - the high efficiency systems of variable and localized HVAC and plenum air circulation, dimmable LED lighting, electrical and A/V / IT technologies, acoustic treatments, and sprinkler. On the loop ceiling, a series of recycled wood slats are arrayed radially and digitally fabricated to house lighting, provide acoustic attenuation and to graphically celebrate both the common and the singular in a contemporary and spatialized stripwoven selvedge pattern. Behind the recycled wood slats, the ceiling is painted in an array of colors that are subtly and momentarily revealed as one walks through the space.