Voith & Mactavish Architects completes the Kenneth K.T. Yen Humanities Building for The Pennington School, a private preparatory school in Pennington, New Jersey. The new building houses eighteen classrooms and five seminar rooms and lies at the center of a comprehensive campus plan VMA produced in 2012.

The new Humanities Building was initially planned to contain 21 classrooms and occupy a larger footprint than the resulting 30,000 sf. Early in the process, however, VMA and the Pennington School realized that they could rethink the program and design in ways that made the best use of space and resources. VMA analyzed Pennington’s daily class schedules and determined that the School would be better served by a mix of classroom sizes rather than the originally programmed series of equal-sized classrooms. The School’s culture would additionally be transformed by creating shared teaching spaces with separate departmental office spaces, rather than designating one classroom per faculty member. Initial plans for the new structure included a fully enclosed lecture hall. With the change in strategy to prioritize flexible and multi-use spaces, VMA created The Forum, an expansive double-height atrium that serves as a space for both lectures and events, as well as informal gatherings and study sessions.

▼公共讨论场所，forum ©Jeffrey Totaro

▼通高空间，double-height atrium ©Jeffrey Totaro