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press release VMDO Architects Honored as a 2010 COTE Top Ten Green Project for Excellence in Sustainable Design
Anne Hooff
“It is especially rewarding that the Manassas Park Elementary project has been recognized as one of the 2010 COTE selections,” comments Bob Moje, Principal, VMDO Architects. “Our common goals are achieving educational and architectural excellence. The innovative design for Manassas Park encourages students to become future environmental stewards. We are grateful for our long-standing collaboration with this community – a truly gratifying experience.” The COTE Top Ten Green Projects program, now in its 14th year, is the profession's best-known recognition program for sustainable design excellence. The program celebrates projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, technology, and natural systems; they make a positive contribution to their communities, improve comfort for building occupants and reduce environmental impacts through strategies such as reuse of existing structures, connection to transit systems, low-impact and regenerative site development, energy and water conservation, use of sustainable or renewable construction materials, and design that improves indoor air quality.
Manassas Park Elementary School + Pre-K, Manassas Park, Va. The innovative design has garnered a number of awards, including:
About The American Institute of Architects
VMDO Architects was founded in 1976 and is the youngest firm to receive the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Virginia Architecture Award, the most prestigious honor given by the Virginia Society of American Institute of Architects. For further information, interview, and photography opportunities in reference to this project and VMDO Architects, please contact William Bishop at 434.296.5684, email at bishop@vmdo.com. |
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VMDO Architects’ Manassas Park Elementary School & Pre-Kindergarten project was recently selected by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) as one of the top ten examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions that protect and enhance the environment. The 2010 COTE selections ranged from an adaptive reuse of a historic turn-of-the-century industrial building in San Francisco to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The VMDO project was the only elementary building cited in the top ten selections. Along with the other nine architects’ projects, VMDO will be honored at the AIA 2010 National Convention and Design Exposition in Miami on June 10th.
MPES is designed around the fundamental premise that people, especially children, cannot be expected to preserve or protect something they do not understand. As such, the school itself is conceived as a teaching tool that shepherds children along a path of environmental stewardship. Inside and out, sustainable design is integrated with the elementary curriculum. Design decisions were made with the expressed goal of showcasing as many teachable moments as possible. Interior extended learning spaces offer dramatic and surprisingly intimate views of the neighboring mixed oak forest, while elementary classrooms face shady moss and fern-covered learning courtyards featuring “fallen” trees and other particularities of an Eastern deciduous forest floor.
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