ArchitectureWeek People and Places: Leo A. Daly

The new South Region High School Number Nine building for the Los Angeles Unified School district, located in South Gate, California, was designed by Leo A Daly. Photo: Leo A Daly/Lawrence Anderson Photography

The Los Angeles Unified School District South Region High School Number 9 (LAUSD No. 9) has opened in South Gate, California. The Los Angeles offices of Omaha, Nebraska-based Leo A Daly designed the 107-000-square-foot (9,940-square-meter) school, which prominently displays irregularly shaped open-air steel canopies and angular glazed entrances against a backdrop of more staid two-story buildings with CMU block walls.

Inside the administration building. Photo: Leo A Daly/Lawrence Anderson Photography

The campus comprises a series of three learning clusters, as well as separate buildings housing gymnasium, performing arts, administration, and maintenance and operation functions. The firm organized these buildings around a central hardscaped courtyard.

The central courtyard. Photo: Leo A Daly/Lawrence Anderson Photography

Light blue steel canopies shelter open-air staircases and courtyard pavilions from direct sun. According to the firm, the distinct arrangement of the campus buildings is intended to create a primary path whose shape echoes that of the nearby Los Angeles River.

One of the three "clusters" at LAUSD No. 9. Photo: Leo A Daly/Lawrence Anderson Photography

Each of the three academic clusters – characterized as schools within a school – is self-contained with classroom, laboratory, and library spaces. To distinguish the three, each was also assigned a unique interior color palette: bright orange, bright green, and a darker "citrus" green. Shared facilities on the campus sport all three school colors.

A corridor inside the orange cluster. Photo: Leo A Daly/Lawrence Anderson Photography

In what also seems like the result of cost-savings measures, the firm highlighted the school's exposed steel structural elements, sheer walls, and trusses, as educational features, teaching students about building systems.