An inside look at how MMHS came to be:
Dreams of a bigger gym, what's up with that rust?, and Are there Any Secret Passageways?
Interview by Jonah Erdman
The Falconer interviewed Phil Poinelli, the project architect behind the design of Mashpee Middle High School and an architect involved in the design of around 100 other schools.
Mr. Poinelli's answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Falconer: Could you talk about your background as an architect and who you are?
PP: My name is Phil Poinelli, I am an architect and I am also an educational planner. The architect came first and I have been practicing architecture since I graduated from Wentworth in 1971 and I have been designing schools since then. Probably six months out of college I got my first job with Pierce and Pierce which became Pierce, Pierce, and Kramer. I eventually went on to become a partner there in the 80s and I have been designing schools ever since. In June it will be 50 years that I have been doing this. I love it. I'd say that in the 50 years, probably 80% of the work that I have designed has been schools, primarily public schools. In 1991 my one remaining partner and I merged our firm, Pierce, Pierce, and Kramer, with SMMA, at the time it was Symmes Maini & McKee Associates, now we are branded as SMMA. We brought our school practice and experience to SMMA, who had never done a school before, and created a K12 practice group here. Now about half of the firm is currently doing public schools and that is a firm of over 200 people. It has been a very successful practice doing public schools.
I say that I never get tired of them because they are all different. Every single one is unique to the community within which it belongs and serves and what's interesting is that it has one of so many different types of spaces in the building. Think of a restaurant, it has a restaurant in terms of the cafeteria, it has sports facilities, a health suite, shops of all sorts, classrooms. About 15 years ago I really focused my efforts on educational planning which is the development of ideas and interviewing clients and really understanding communities and helping to determine what is best for that community and then it gets turned over to designers and other architects in the firm for execution. What this has allowed me to do is to do what I'm most interested in and I'm able to do what I want and only what I want which is nice *laugh*. But it also allows me to influence virtually all of the school projects in the office and at any given time we have 7 to 10 projects going on. So I have the ability to imprint on each of those in some way and as part of becoming an educational planner I have got deeply involved in the understanding of how education takes place and have done a lot of reading and research around how to take what scientists have learned about the brain and how the brain works and how you and I and everyone around us all learn differently and how that can take physical form.
The Falconer interviewed Phil Poinelli, the project architect behind the design of Mashpee Middle High School and an architect involved in the design of around 100 other schools.
Mr. Poinelli's answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Falconer: Could you talk about your background as an architect and who you are?
PP: My name is Phil Poinelli, I am an architect and I am also an educational planner. The architect came first and I have been practicing architecture since I graduated from Wentworth in 1971 and I have been designing schools since then. Probably six months out of college I got my first job with Pierce and Pierce which became Pierce, Pierce, and Kramer. I eventually went on to become a partner there in the 80s and I have been designing schools ever since. In June it will be 50 years that I have been doing this. I love it. I'd say that in the 50 years, probably 80% of the work that I have designed has been schools, primarily public schools. In 1991 my one remaining partner and I merged our firm, Pierce, Pierce, and Kramer, with SMMA, at the time it was Symmes Maini & McKee Associates, now we are branded as SMMA. We brought our school practice and experience to SMMA, who had never done a school before, and created a K12 practice group here. Now about half of the firm is currently doing public schools and that is a firm of over 200 people. It has been a very successful practice doing public schools.
I say that I never get tired of them because they are all different. Every single one is unique to the community within which it belongs and serves and what's interesting is that it has one of so many different types of spaces in the building. Think of a restaurant, it has a restaurant in terms of the cafeteria, it has sports facilities, a health suite, shops of all sorts, classrooms. About 15 years ago I really focused my efforts on educational planning which is the development of ideas and interviewing clients and really understanding communities and helping to determine what is best for that community and then it gets turned over to designers and other architects in the firm for execution. What this has allowed me to do is to do what I'm most interested in and I'm able to do what I want and only what I want which is nice *laugh*. But it also allows me to influence virtually all of the school projects in the office and at any given time we have 7 to 10 projects going on. So I have the ability to imprint on each of those in some way and as part of becoming an educational planner I have got deeply involved in the understanding of how education takes place and have done a lot of reading and research around how to take what scientists have learned about the brain and how the brain works and how you and I and everyone around us all learn differently and how that can take physical form.
How do we determine how those ideas around education manifest themselves in the building department? So schools today look very different than they did 10 years ago. Certainly very different than Mashpee Middle-High school looks now. Our schools that are being designed and constructed today look very different from that and the process of determining what they look like and how they take form is a different process. We designed Mashpee Middle-High school in the early 90s, about 25 years ago. I have put a lot of work into my career and have gotten a lot out of it as well.
The Falconer: How many schools have you designed?
PP: About eight years ago I actually calculated that and at that time it was somewhere around 75 or 80 so now it is probably upwards of 100 and that includes renovations and all kinds of different renovations at schools. But those are the schools I have touched so somewhere close to 100.
The Falconer: Do you use a template while designing schools or is each facility designed differently?
PP: Every building is unique. With that said, the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) who funds most projects to some degree, they approve some plans or designs as standard schools and we have had a couple of schools that have been accepted into that program. So we have had some communities come to us and say “We want that plan” but even with that it still must be modified to the community, to the curriculum, and to the site. Although some schools have similarities in floor plan, they are unique. We have done a couple of schools using the MSBA’s plan but we prefer not to and the last time we were asked to do it, we declined the opportunity because we didn’t want to reconstitute the old plan that may have had some old thinking to it.
The Falconer: Does designing a high school differ from designing an elementary school or other building?
PP: Yes. The elementary school students for the most part are staying within a primary classroom and then leave the classroom to go to art, music, gym, and so forth. In middle school classrooms are typically arranged by teams, a team is typically constituted by English, Social Studies, Math, and Science. Sometimes the team will include a foreign language but most often it is only those four classrooms so if you put 24 students in each of those classrooms, that constitutes to a team of 96 students so you have these team areas which very often take the form of pods of classrooms. That's four classrooms plus special education plus breakouts plus project areas. So that is very different from the elementary school.
Then you get up to the high school and we typically still like to design classrooms so they are ubiquitous and can be used for History or math or English for example. But they are arranged in smaller areas that constitute essentially like teams but are smaller learning communities which make up a larger school. Where an elementary school might be five or six hundred students, a middle school is very often in the six to eight hundred student range and a high school is often anywhere from one thousand to two thousand so again a two thousand student school is in fact very different from a one thousand student high school. There are a lot of unique qualities to those spaces. That said there are still a lot of reusable components so what does the classroom look like, classrooms are slightly larger than they have been in the past but are also now designed to have a great deal of flexibility.
When I was in school, all throughout kindergarten to grade 12, it was to keep quiet, sit up straight, pay attention and it was the teacher talking at you. They were the purveyor of knowledge and you were supposed to be a sponge. We know that doesn’t work for all people. As I was saying before, people have their own learning styles, learning modalities, and so we design schools and classrooms now for all students to be able to thrive with different learning modalities. The rooms have to be flexible, the furniture lightweight and easy to move, so people can be working individually, in pairs, in small groups or as a full sized classroom. Typically in all grade levels now we are designing learning commons outside of the classroom so that students can move from the classroom to the learning commons for project or small group work and we typically have small group rooms for quite space, tutoring, individual work, pairs, small groups so lots of different spaces are available around the school. What is also important is listening to students and getting student perspectives and voices as part of our learning process to know what is going to work best for the community and also have students feel like they have an opinion in the school itself.
When Mashpee was designed, the discussions took place with the administration and teachers but really focused around the very traditional way of teaching so MMHS has two story tall classroom wings with long corridors and classrooms on each side of the corridor, we call that a double loaded corridor also referred to sometimes as cells and bells or an egg crate design, there are still lots of schools around the country that are still being designed that way but none that come out of this office. We have a very different attitude and approach to school design. Instead of opening up to a page in the textbook now learning is a lot more project based.
The Falconer: How did you come to be involved in the design of MMHS?
PP: Let me give you a little bit of history on that. I was not the concept designer for it, I was what's referred to as the project architect. The project architect is the one who determines or leads the team in determining how the building is going to be built, selecting the materials, and detailing/putting together the drawings associated with it. The concept design was really done by two people, one from this office, Ed Fernet, and we were in association with Perkins and Will out of Chicago, Bill Brubaker who was what I would call one of the godfathers of school design back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, was part of the team. It was a joint effort between Ed and Bill in developing the concept design.
Although my colleague Bob Kramer and I had a lot of prior experience designing schools, SMMA didn’t so we decided to bring Perkins and Will onto the team to be able to say here is one of the leading firms in the country that is going to be part of this team and so SMMA was the prime architect, we put together all of the drawings, the concept design was very much a joint effort between between the two. Perkins and Will had a aethstetic style at the time that was very recognizable which was certainly represented in elements of MMHS, the large stacked glass walls that are more horizontal than they are vertical can be seen at the main entrance and cafeteria and areas like that. That was very much Perkins and Will’s style.
Before the 1990s, Mashpee didn’t have a high school, students had to enroll at Falmouth High School. Unlike today where we interviewed every single teacher, there were no teachers to interview. Most of the effort was meeting with the administrators who were new to the district as well. It was a very unique situation.
The Falconer: Were there any sections or aspects of the building that stood out to you or caused design challenges?
PP: We were very fortunate to have what we refer to as a green field site. Meaning it was an untouched site. That is very rare in communities today. It was a matter of cutting down more trees than one would want to cut down to create not only the school but also the massive amounts of fields that you have there. The site is flat, the site is sandy so its easy to build. There were very very few constraints to the design of the building and the site so if it doesn’t work then shame on us [*laugh*].
There was no central wastewater disposal system in Mashpee and with the size of the school that dictated the need for a wastewater treatment plant. Off by Route 151 there is a small concrete block building which is a wastewater treatment plant for the school. All of the waste water goes through that building and gets treated. Supposedly the water is drinkable after the process but it is then injected back into the aquifer which eventually finds its way to the trout stream. There really weren’t any site challenges involved, though you always have the challenge of meeting a budget.
The only problem I can think of is that we installed a sprinkler system at the school to water the grass and if you notice that there are places where the concrete sidewalks are rust colored and there are areas of the school that are rust colored. That is in fact rust. There is high iron content in the water that comes out of the wells. As it comes out of the wells and sprays onto the building or the sidewalks, the iron in the water rusts. That was noticed early on and in fact the landscape architect offered to donate a filtration system to filter the iron out so it wouldn’t continue to do that and the town decided that they didn’t want that and they didn’t mind the rust, they didn’t want to deal with the upkeep costs of having to change filters and so on. So that is probably a little known legacy that is associated with the school building and site.
The Falconer: Was there anything you wanted to include in the design of MMHS that didn’t make it in the final cut because of budget constraints or any other reasons?
PP: Yes there were a couple things. One was they wanted the gymnasium to be a little bit bigger than it is. There was an interest in having a pool or additional cross court to elongate the gym. We designed the building with this but eventually took it out because of the cost. It would have been about a 25% increase in the length of the gymnasium. If you go to the end of the gym and go outside, there is a large green area there with the sidewalk going around it. That area was designated to have the increased gym size. The exterior gym wall and the structure was designed to accommodate the added length to the gym in the future so it would be very easy to add that addition if the town chose to because the infrastructure was designed to accept that.
The other thing that was a design element was that as you come into the school’s lobby, the administration is on your left, that long two story tall corridor was intended to have a pyramidal skylight the full length of the corridor to really flood that area with light. The cost estimates at the time suggested that the building was over budget and during discussions with the town we had to end up taking that out. It turns out that the budget estimates were off and we came in under budget. That would have allowed for both of these features to be built but things were too far along to change that so they were not incorporated into the school.
The Falconer: Have there been any changes in safety aspects or other building codes that you must include now that you didn’t have to include when designing MMHS?
PP: Yes. Building codes are constantly changing and being upgraded. I think the accessibility code was pretty much in place at that point so accessibility is ubiquitous through the school. Not much has changed there. At the time, automatic fire protection systems, sprinklers, were not required in schools, MMHS has them, but they weren’t required at the time, now they are required. Science rooms, it is not a law but is a national standard, science rooms have gotten larger, at MMHS is 1200 square feet while today that same classroom would be 1440 square feet. MMHS is certainly grandfathered and is not dangerous in any way shape or form but there are new standards which we follow today.
Structurally, the building does have seismic restraints but those have probably gotten a little bit tougher in the last 25 years but again MMHS has a significant amount of that. From a standpoint of school safety and security that has changed over the years. We have fewer doors into schools today. We have systems where if any door is opened, there is an automatic indication in the main office of which door is open and there is a map of where it is. As you enter a school, you typically can get into a vestibule but then the inner set of doors would be locked and there would be a window into the administrative office where you would have to go to get your visitors pass before they are actually allowed to enter the building. It is important for the administration to see the body language and mood of the person before they are allowed in. There are a lot of other safety measures that we incorporate today that I call invisible changes. We do not want a building to look fortified, we want it to be as inviting as possible but still have additional safety measures built in.
The Falconer: Are the windows seen in the front of the school a safety concern or would you still do that today?
PP: We would still do that today. Windows into the building I don’t see as a problem, police very often want to see into the school so if something is going on, they can observe it from the outside. The difference is that we would probably put concrete or granite benches in front of that glass out by the sidewalk or ballards, a pipe full of concrete that you see in front of many buildings, or low lamp posts but are so sturdy that you could not drive a vehicle past them. You would use the site and landscape design to generate features that look like they belong to add lighting or places to sit that in fact are doing a double duty of providing an amenity and additional safety measures.
The Falconer: If you were redesigning MMHS today, is there anything you would change?
PP: Yes. I would reconfigure the classroom wings so they are not long double loaded corridors. They would have variety to them, they would have different zones where the classrooms would have relationships to each other to promote a collaboration, the teachers would have workrooms so that kind of collaboration could take place on a teacher to teacher level. I think the public spaces in the school, the gym, auditorium, cafeteria, would not be significantly changed. The administrative wing which in plan looks like an arrowhead, that could be a nod to the indigenous people, would stay the same. Primarily changes would occur to the classroom wings. The furniture would also become more up to date so it is more ergonomic, flexible, lighter, softer. The furniture would be much different than it currently is.
The Falconer: Does the school have any secret rooms like a secret basement, attic, or passageways?
PP: It does not. The two classroom wings do have what is called an interstitial space in the ceiling of the higher part of the roof so on the side of the hall with the taller classrooms but that space is not occupiable. It is only for the access to the ventilation system.
The Falconer: How many schools have you designed?
PP: About eight years ago I actually calculated that and at that time it was somewhere around 75 or 80 so now it is probably upwards of 100 and that includes renovations and all kinds of different renovations at schools. But those are the schools I have touched so somewhere close to 100.
The Falconer: Do you use a template while designing schools or is each facility designed differently?
PP: Every building is unique. With that said, the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) who funds most projects to some degree, they approve some plans or designs as standard schools and we have had a couple of schools that have been accepted into that program. So we have had some communities come to us and say “We want that plan” but even with that it still must be modified to the community, to the curriculum, and to the site. Although some schools have similarities in floor plan, they are unique. We have done a couple of schools using the MSBA’s plan but we prefer not to and the last time we were asked to do it, we declined the opportunity because we didn’t want to reconstitute the old plan that may have had some old thinking to it.
The Falconer: Does designing a high school differ from designing an elementary school or other building?
PP: Yes. The elementary school students for the most part are staying within a primary classroom and then leave the classroom to go to art, music, gym, and so forth. In middle school classrooms are typically arranged by teams, a team is typically constituted by English, Social Studies, Math, and Science. Sometimes the team will include a foreign language but most often it is only those four classrooms so if you put 24 students in each of those classrooms, that constitutes to a team of 96 students so you have these team areas which very often take the form of pods of classrooms. That's four classrooms plus special education plus breakouts plus project areas. So that is very different from the elementary school.
Then you get up to the high school and we typically still like to design classrooms so they are ubiquitous and can be used for History or math or English for example. But they are arranged in smaller areas that constitute essentially like teams but are smaller learning communities which make up a larger school. Where an elementary school might be five or six hundred students, a middle school is very often in the six to eight hundred student range and a high school is often anywhere from one thousand to two thousand so again a two thousand student school is in fact very different from a one thousand student high school. There are a lot of unique qualities to those spaces. That said there are still a lot of reusable components so what does the classroom look like, classrooms are slightly larger than they have been in the past but are also now designed to have a great deal of flexibility.
When I was in school, all throughout kindergarten to grade 12, it was to keep quiet, sit up straight, pay attention and it was the teacher talking at you. They were the purveyor of knowledge and you were supposed to be a sponge. We know that doesn’t work for all people. As I was saying before, people have their own learning styles, learning modalities, and so we design schools and classrooms now for all students to be able to thrive with different learning modalities. The rooms have to be flexible, the furniture lightweight and easy to move, so people can be working individually, in pairs, in small groups or as a full sized classroom. Typically in all grade levels now we are designing learning commons outside of the classroom so that students can move from the classroom to the learning commons for project or small group work and we typically have small group rooms for quite space, tutoring, individual work, pairs, small groups so lots of different spaces are available around the school. What is also important is listening to students and getting student perspectives and voices as part of our learning process to know what is going to work best for the community and also have students feel like they have an opinion in the school itself.
When Mashpee was designed, the discussions took place with the administration and teachers but really focused around the very traditional way of teaching so MMHS has two story tall classroom wings with long corridors and classrooms on each side of the corridor, we call that a double loaded corridor also referred to sometimes as cells and bells or an egg crate design, there are still lots of schools around the country that are still being designed that way but none that come out of this office. We have a very different attitude and approach to school design. Instead of opening up to a page in the textbook now learning is a lot more project based.
The Falconer: How did you come to be involved in the design of MMHS?
PP: Let me give you a little bit of history on that. I was not the concept designer for it, I was what's referred to as the project architect. The project architect is the one who determines or leads the team in determining how the building is going to be built, selecting the materials, and detailing/putting together the drawings associated with it. The concept design was really done by two people, one from this office, Ed Fernet, and we were in association with Perkins and Will out of Chicago, Bill Brubaker who was what I would call one of the godfathers of school design back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, was part of the team. It was a joint effort between Ed and Bill in developing the concept design.
Although my colleague Bob Kramer and I had a lot of prior experience designing schools, SMMA didn’t so we decided to bring Perkins and Will onto the team to be able to say here is one of the leading firms in the country that is going to be part of this team and so SMMA was the prime architect, we put together all of the drawings, the concept design was very much a joint effort between between the two. Perkins and Will had a aethstetic style at the time that was very recognizable which was certainly represented in elements of MMHS, the large stacked glass walls that are more horizontal than they are vertical can be seen at the main entrance and cafeteria and areas like that. That was very much Perkins and Will’s style.
Before the 1990s, Mashpee didn’t have a high school, students had to enroll at Falmouth High School. Unlike today where we interviewed every single teacher, there were no teachers to interview. Most of the effort was meeting with the administrators who were new to the district as well. It was a very unique situation.
The Falconer: Were there any sections or aspects of the building that stood out to you or caused design challenges?
PP: We were very fortunate to have what we refer to as a green field site. Meaning it was an untouched site. That is very rare in communities today. It was a matter of cutting down more trees than one would want to cut down to create not only the school but also the massive amounts of fields that you have there. The site is flat, the site is sandy so its easy to build. There were very very few constraints to the design of the building and the site so if it doesn’t work then shame on us [*laugh*].
There was no central wastewater disposal system in Mashpee and with the size of the school that dictated the need for a wastewater treatment plant. Off by Route 151 there is a small concrete block building which is a wastewater treatment plant for the school. All of the waste water goes through that building and gets treated. Supposedly the water is drinkable after the process but it is then injected back into the aquifer which eventually finds its way to the trout stream. There really weren’t any site challenges involved, though you always have the challenge of meeting a budget.
The only problem I can think of is that we installed a sprinkler system at the school to water the grass and if you notice that there are places where the concrete sidewalks are rust colored and there are areas of the school that are rust colored. That is in fact rust. There is high iron content in the water that comes out of the wells. As it comes out of the wells and sprays onto the building or the sidewalks, the iron in the water rusts. That was noticed early on and in fact the landscape architect offered to donate a filtration system to filter the iron out so it wouldn’t continue to do that and the town decided that they didn’t want that and they didn’t mind the rust, they didn’t want to deal with the upkeep costs of having to change filters and so on. So that is probably a little known legacy that is associated with the school building and site.
The Falconer: Was there anything you wanted to include in the design of MMHS that didn’t make it in the final cut because of budget constraints or any other reasons?
PP: Yes there were a couple things. One was they wanted the gymnasium to be a little bit bigger than it is. There was an interest in having a pool or additional cross court to elongate the gym. We designed the building with this but eventually took it out because of the cost. It would have been about a 25% increase in the length of the gymnasium. If you go to the end of the gym and go outside, there is a large green area there with the sidewalk going around it. That area was designated to have the increased gym size. The exterior gym wall and the structure was designed to accommodate the added length to the gym in the future so it would be very easy to add that addition if the town chose to because the infrastructure was designed to accept that.
The other thing that was a design element was that as you come into the school’s lobby, the administration is on your left, that long two story tall corridor was intended to have a pyramidal skylight the full length of the corridor to really flood that area with light. The cost estimates at the time suggested that the building was over budget and during discussions with the town we had to end up taking that out. It turns out that the budget estimates were off and we came in under budget. That would have allowed for both of these features to be built but things were too far along to change that so they were not incorporated into the school.
The Falconer: Have there been any changes in safety aspects or other building codes that you must include now that you didn’t have to include when designing MMHS?
PP: Yes. Building codes are constantly changing and being upgraded. I think the accessibility code was pretty much in place at that point so accessibility is ubiquitous through the school. Not much has changed there. At the time, automatic fire protection systems, sprinklers, were not required in schools, MMHS has them, but they weren’t required at the time, now they are required. Science rooms, it is not a law but is a national standard, science rooms have gotten larger, at MMHS is 1200 square feet while today that same classroom would be 1440 square feet. MMHS is certainly grandfathered and is not dangerous in any way shape or form but there are new standards which we follow today.
Structurally, the building does have seismic restraints but those have probably gotten a little bit tougher in the last 25 years but again MMHS has a significant amount of that. From a standpoint of school safety and security that has changed over the years. We have fewer doors into schools today. We have systems where if any door is opened, there is an automatic indication in the main office of which door is open and there is a map of where it is. As you enter a school, you typically can get into a vestibule but then the inner set of doors would be locked and there would be a window into the administrative office where you would have to go to get your visitors pass before they are actually allowed to enter the building. It is important for the administration to see the body language and mood of the person before they are allowed in. There are a lot of other safety measures that we incorporate today that I call invisible changes. We do not want a building to look fortified, we want it to be as inviting as possible but still have additional safety measures built in.
The Falconer: Are the windows seen in the front of the school a safety concern or would you still do that today?
PP: We would still do that today. Windows into the building I don’t see as a problem, police very often want to see into the school so if something is going on, they can observe it from the outside. The difference is that we would probably put concrete or granite benches in front of that glass out by the sidewalk or ballards, a pipe full of concrete that you see in front of many buildings, or low lamp posts but are so sturdy that you could not drive a vehicle past them. You would use the site and landscape design to generate features that look like they belong to add lighting or places to sit that in fact are doing a double duty of providing an amenity and additional safety measures.
The Falconer: If you were redesigning MMHS today, is there anything you would change?
PP: Yes. I would reconfigure the classroom wings so they are not long double loaded corridors. They would have variety to them, they would have different zones where the classrooms would have relationships to each other to promote a collaboration, the teachers would have workrooms so that kind of collaboration could take place on a teacher to teacher level. I think the public spaces in the school, the gym, auditorium, cafeteria, would not be significantly changed. The administrative wing which in plan looks like an arrowhead, that could be a nod to the indigenous people, would stay the same. Primarily changes would occur to the classroom wings. The furniture would also become more up to date so it is more ergonomic, flexible, lighter, softer. The furniture would be much different than it currently is.
The Falconer: Does the school have any secret rooms like a secret basement, attic, or passageways?
PP: It does not. The two classroom wings do have what is called an interstitial space in the ceiling of the higher part of the roof so on the side of the hall with the taller classrooms but that space is not occupiable. It is only for the access to the ventilation system.