John Lewis Elementary School

John Lewis Elementary School was designed to be the first school in the District of Columbia to achieve Net Zero Energy (NZE). The project is also pursuing LEED for Schools Platinum and WELL certification, setting a new benchmark. The project’s design principles focused on civic presence, community connectivity, and—most importantly—student experience and wellness to create a high-performance, 21st-century learning environment. While the new building replaces an obsolete, brutalist, open plan building, it also intentionally retained its best aspects— flexible space and ease of communication—while providing better adjacencies, daylighting, acoustics, security, and outdoor space in order to enhance wellness and building performance, with the ultimate goal to enhance educational outcomes. The design emphasizes outdoor recreation and connections with the natural world, known to improve student health and academic achievement. The landscape design embeds natural systems with dynamic play and learning spaces to blur the walls of the classroom. A treasured place for the community, certain school amenities are accessible after-hours and on weekends. The building reads inside and out as a series of intimate, child-scaled houses that foster collaboration and strong relationships inside and feel at home in the adjacent residential neighborhood. The school’s “civic presence” features a large photovoltaic array to inspire the entire community to embrace sustainable design. The school honors its proximity to Rock Creek Park through interior and exterior textures, materials, and environmental quality. This is prominently seen in the library, where discovery zones and reading nooks encourage learning, socialization, and engagement for all students, and a large-scale mural by a beloved local artist is the backdrop to a “treehouse” maker-space. An high-performance dashboard tracks the building’s energy consumption, showcases the building’s sustainability features, and links to the school’s curriculum to address topics such as Social and Environmental Justice, Climate Change, and Water Conservation. Perkins Eastman DC is the Architect; Perkins Eastman is the Associate Architect.