The design process for Lake Central High School St John Ind was done in a new collaboration lab a work space where large groups of people from various disciplines can contribute to a projectrsquos design at the same time

A new Approach to Design

Feb. 20, 2013
Lake Central High School, St. John, Ind., uses innovation to cut 40 percent from design time for its major renovation.

Lake Central High School in St. John, Ind., sliced months off the normal design time for its major renovation that is now in progress. School administrators were able to do that by using technology, a fast-track process and a new collaboration lab at its architectural firm, Schmidt Associates in Indianapolis.

Lake Central’s administration had recognized for years that its high school was crowded and that aging building systems in parts of the 1960s building were inadequate. 

After one referendum to approve renovation funding failed in 2009, the district succeeded in a second referendum attempt in November 2011.  Administrators set an ambitious goal of designing 850,000 square feet of renovations and being ready to break ground in summer 2012. 

“Our school board approved hiring Schmidt Associates for the design work 13 days after the election, and we started design meetings right after Thanksgiving week,” says Bill Ledyard, director of facilities for Lake Central School Corporation. 

“The only way we could design for an estimated $100 million in construction and meet the schedule was to make our process the exact opposite of classical architecture training,” said Tom Neff, AIA, Schmidt Associates’ lead architect on the project. “Rather than design the overall building and figure out how various elements would fit together inside, we designed all the pieces–science rooms, classrooms, gyms and an auditorium–to meet the specifications of each department and then we connected them.” 

St. John is a two-hour drive from Schmidt Associates’ headquarters in Indianapolis, so the design team set up a parallel staff for the initial design input meetings.  One team worked on site at Lake Central and the other worked at the Schmidt Associates office.  

“The on-site team would spend two to three days at a time at Lake Central meeting with department heads,” says Neff.  “We brought plans and renderings of components of other high schools we’ve designed, showed them to the Lake Central staff and asked, ‘What do you like and what would you change for your program?’’’ 

The on-site team put up a collage of pasteups all over the walls, then photographed the rough images and e-mailed them back to the team working in Indianapolis. The office team would recognize that Lake Central’s preferred designs most closely resembled the science rooms or media center at another school they had designed and upload 3D models of those elements. The on-site team would have the 3D models on their iPads for the start of the following day’s design session. 

“We were designing in a three-day period what would take three to four weeks in the ‘old world,’” says Neff.

In Neff’s “old world” of design (which would have been less than a year ago), the engineering process would not start until the architectural floor plan was completed.

An isometric view of the new media center at Lake Central High School, St. John, Ind.

In February, the design process moved to the new collaboration lab, a work space where large groups of people from various disciplines can contribute to a project’s design at the same time. Everyone’s work–from architectural design to mechanical to civil engineering–is displayed on a large wall where multiple screens can switch to different views and design layers. What differentiates it from a typical multimedia presentation is that up to five project leaders can select the images used on screen.            

“Around 40 people were in those sessions, including electrical, mechanical, plumbing and civil engineers and construction managers,” says Ledyard.  “We’d go back and forth from building and site plans to civil engineering and other disciplines, all brainstorming about how we could create a more effective high school.

“They were long days, but they were productive days, because we got so much done.”

“We used the collaboration lab to pull the pieces of the project together,” says Neff. “We morphed the various components together and then designed the building elements to connect them. It was like creating a college campus master plan, but within a single building.” 

A mechanical engineer broke the building down into six-room units so the team would know the mechanical and electrical load for those six rooms as it worked on the overall building design and the mechanical components at the same time. Once they understood what the mechanical system looked like, they could go on to work on lighting design.

“It saved a great deal of the owner’s staff time because we didn’t have them look at the components one by one; we’d have them look at everything at once,” says Neff.

“The screens are used not just to pull up our building modeling tools, we’re also accessing Google Earth, blog sites, meeting notes, scheduling documents and information available on the Internet,” says architect Greg Hempstead, who helped design the collaboration lab.

The renovated high school is so large, it will need its own electrical substation. NIPSCO, the electrical utility for St. John, wouldn’t sign off on installing a substation until the design team verified the power data for heating, cooling and lights, so the time savings from having that data early on was substantial.  “If we hadn’t uploaded plans to the ‘cloud’ and used the collaboration lab, we’d never have met the schedule,” says Neff.

“The collaboration lab changes the nature of a meeting from a few chosen people merely presenting information they have determined,” says Hempstead.  “Although the meeting may start with a presentation, it quickly turns into a discussion. The discussion then facilitates decision making.”

The team also used a blog to share design information with school board members, staff and the community. A cyber signoff process expedited approval of each design element. 

By the April collaboration lab meetings, construction managers began plotting construction phasing as designers continued refining design details.

Because the existing high school needs to function, the construction is being completed in phases, with new sections built then old sections demolished over a three-year period until the work is completed. The 586,000-square-foot-building serving 3,255 students will be expanded to 850,000 square feet and accommodate 3,600 students easily. Construction began in the summer of 2012 and will be completed in 2015.

 “The collaboration lab has been a real asset to move this complex, fast-track project along,” said Ledyard. “I’ll bet we’ve shaved off 30 to 40 percent of the normal design time.”

Schmidt Associates is an architectural firm in Indianapolis.

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