Larchmont Schools at Lafayette Park

Welton Becket & Associates’ once elegant west coast headquarters for New York Life Insurance, plagued by decades of neglect and insensitive maintenance, has found new life as a vertical, urban middle & high school for 500 students. With a design philosophy of “progressive conservation,” 21st century concerns are interlaced into the innovative, generative ideas of this unique mid-century building. The original building had a forward-thinking relationship to its site and environmental factors, qualities the project team sought to build upon. Working with guidelines from the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) addressing the correlation between healthy environments and student performance, we identified a few key areas that made the transformation of the building viable, progressive and architecturally exciting – lighting, natural ventilation, and acoustics. Passive, economical practices and an intelligent plan reconfiguration, along with high- efficacy and smart-controlled environmental systems, allowed the school’s tight budget to achieve high value for its students. As a reinvestment and rehabilitation project, retaining the significant features of Becket’s design while using the built-in flexibility of a normative office building to accommodate a new program provides a model for future projects: bringing needed facilities to an evolving city while respecting and building upon its rich history.