Ceco doors enhance design at award-winning Taconic Hills Central School. (Case Study).

SINCE OPENING IN FALL 1999, THE TACONIC HILLS CENTRAL SCHOOL in rural upstate New York has attracted attention from across the country for its innovative concept and design.

The school has won several national, regional and state awards, including the prestigious Learning by Design

One reason the facility works so well is that every architectural element and building product was carefully selected not just for its particular function, but also for its contribution to the overall design. Interior and exterior hollow metal doors--far from being merely utilitarian--serve as the portal to good design, as well as efficient function.

"The issues are durability, maintainability, security and aesthetics," said J. Louis Turpin, AIA, AICP, executive principal of Rhinebeck Architecture & Planning in Rhinebeck, New York.

The Taconic Hills Central School is the result of years of debate and consideration among residents of the Taconic Hills district, which was formed in 1969 through the merger of two rural school districts in Columbia County, New York, near the Massachusetts border.

One district, Turpin said, had a school built in the late 1950s; the other had a building dating to the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration era. Both buildings were sorely in need of replacement or major renovations, so the new district began to consider new construction shortly after the merger.

The district purchased land for a new building in the town of Craryville, but then was unable to decide exactly what type of structure should be built on the 56-acre site. During the next 25 years, voters rejected 11 bond referendums as citizens and officials--split by old loyalties to their previous districts--wrangled over the issue.

In 1994, Rhinebeck Architecture & Planning, which specializes in educational facilities design, was hired to prepare a district-wide master facilities plan focusing on evaluating the existing buildings for renovation. The firm provided that information, but also offered an alternative that hadn't been proposed before--closing both existing schools and building a new, consolidated K-12 school on the still-vacant site. A 1997 referendum on that plan was overwhelmingly approved.

The vote put the project on a fast track. The design was developed over the next few months, and construction began in Spring 1998. The facility was completed in September 1999, in time for the new school year. The school is designed for a capacity of 2,000 students and currently houses 1,870.

"The most significant challenge was related to the magnitude of the building," Turpin said. At 350,000 square feet, the school is one of the largest in the state of New York. "The challenge was to take what could be a very large building and break it down, so that seen through the eyes of a very young child, it would not be overwhelming."

The $50 million building, whose design incorporates ideas gathered in public meetings, houses five distinct user groups--the kindergarten-second grade (K-2) primary program, the third-sixth grade (3-6) intermediate program, the seventh-eighth grade (7-8) middle school, the ninth-twelfth (9-12) high school, and a community center.

The plan groups the K-2 and 3-6 units on one side and the 7-8 and 9-12 units on the other. The entry to each side features a dramatic light-filled two-story atrium, which serves as a focal point so that students always know where they are in their half of the building. The community center is situated between the two school wings.

The facility includes a state-of-the-art, 1,000-seat performing arts center that opens to an outdoor amphitheater (the two share a common stage), two media centers, an aquatic/fitness center, and three subdividable gymnasiums with stadium-style seating.

To help provide additional visualcues, the design uses two colors--teal and cranberry--throughout the building, including on the metal doors and frames. Those colors help draw together the two original school districts, whose colors included teal and cranberry.

The original quote for the facility called for 759 interior and exterior doors, including 276 hollow metal doors. New York's stringent bid policies regarding public projects require that contractors be allowed to substitute products if needed to obtain the best pricing. "We can't tailor our specs around one particular product," said John Sharkey, project architect. "You have to allow contractors to substitute comparable products, So that's why we can't write our specs too tight."

Instead, the specifications carefully defined the standards that the door products must meet, thus limiting options to high-quality products from a few select manufacturers.

"We wanted doors that were elemental to an overall design concept rather than doors that project a cold, 'baby-boomer' aesthetic," Turpin said. "We wanted a quality metal door, one that provides security and easy maintainability and can be replaced easily if necessary. We wanted to make sure that we got the quality in this case."

Ceco Medallion doors, rated heavy duty, grade 2, with 18-gage steel, were used in the building's interior. Designed for "student-proof' durability under high-frequency traffic conditions, these doors feature 7-gage steel hinge reinforcements. Some of the doors include flush-welded glass lite trim.

Exterior doors are Ceco Imperial, extra-heavy-duty, grade 3, with 16-gage steel face sheets. They are fully insulated with a foamed-in-place polyurethane core and are fire rated for up to three hours. The doors include 7-gage steel hinge reinforcements and have mechanically interlocking, hemmed vertical-edge seams for rigidity.

All metal doors met SDI-100 standards, SDI-117 manufacturing tolerances and SSPC-SPl preparation standards, Sharkey said.

The metal doors were manufactured to order and shipped to the general contractor, Colonie Masonry Corporation, Schenectady, New York, in three stages. Cutouts and re- inforcements were added at the factory to receive hardware, which included Yale Commercial Locks & Hardware mortise locks and exit devices and Norton door closers.

In mid-project, the school district received a large donation that allowed for the addition of the aquatic/fitness center in the center of the building. That facility included an additional 30 heavy-duty doors, some with sidelight frames.

Hundreds of Ceco SQ-series custom metal frames were used to create the soaring atria and media centers, which rise up to 30 feet. The project included 540 three-sided hollow metal frames and 103 hollow metal special units, including transoms, sidelights and interior segmented windows. Interior frames are fire-rated 16-gage steel, and exterior frames are 14-gage.

The metal doors and frames along with the other building materials in the project, combine to take the Taconic Hills Central School's design from dream to reality. The project has been extraordinarily successful, garnering the American School & University magazine's 2000 William M. Caudill Citation; the Westchester/Mid-Hudson Chapter of the American Institute of Architects' 2001 Design Award of Architectural Excellence; the Build New York award from the General Building Contractors of New York, a 2001 honorable mention from Education Design Showcase, published by School Planning & Management and College Planning & Management; and the Capital District Masonry Institute's John J. McManus Memorial Mark of Excellence Award.

Turpin said the winning design is the result of all of the elements--building materials, architectural design and, most importantly, the community's vision. "I think what was really special about this is that we were starting with an absolutely clean slate and working from the entire spectrum of the school community; this gave us the ability to design the optimal school for the future," he said. "It has everything that a contemporary, 21st-century school wants to have in it, but it also is firmly grounded in the historical role of the community schoolhouse."

Rhinebeck Architecture & Planning, based in Rhinebeck, New York, specializes in the design of educational facilities, ranging from conceptual evaluations and minor repairs to complete design and construction administration involving renovation and new construction. The firm has provided professional services on more than 50 projects in the last few years and annually designs and consults on projects valued at nearly $100 million. The 12-person firm, whose architects average 20 years' experience, is large enough to meet clients' complex and varying needs, but small enough to allow the founding principal to be continuously involved in the design and management of every project. Rhinebeck Architecture has received numerous national, state and regional awards for its work and was recently featured in the new book Class Architecture by Dr. Michael J. Crosbie.

Mike Ott is Marketing Manager for Ceco Door Products, an ASSA ABLOY group company, marketed through YSG Door Security Consultants. He has more than 33 years of experience in sales and marketing with Ceco and is responsible for commercial marketing, brand management and competitive brand profiling. Ceco Door Products has more than 1,000 employees at three manufacturing plants and nine distribution centers. It is one of the world's leading suppliers of steel doors and frames for commercial, industrial and institutional applications. For more information, call 731/686-8345 or visit their website at www.cecodoor.com.