Thursday was a car trip to East Hampton to visit the Ross School. Jennifer, Lynn, and the Sweet things Master baker went to visit the school for ideas on how to design the Girls Club building. They asked me to come along because the next stop on my internship journey is to the architect’s office.
The Ross School is a green school, and was started about 6 years ago by a mother who was unsatisfied with the school that her fifth grade daughter was attending, so she decided to start her own school. The school started out with two students in the fifth grade and has now grown to a 6-12th grade school with 250, with plans for 50 more students next year and so on. It’s a private school and tuition is 11 thousand dollars a year but about 50% of the student body is receiving some form of financial aid.
The school building itself is amazing. It is the most remarkable school or building in general that I have ever seen. The campus consists of 6 buildings, each with its own purpose, but we were only able to visit the Wellness Center. The building doesn’t look special from the outside, but once inside it’s a completely different story. At the entrance, we were asked to take our shoes off and the tour guide handed us slippers. Turns out, none of the students or staff is allowed with shoes in that building, only slippers (with the exception of dance, gym students, and the kitchen staff).
The design of the building is a mix of ancient African designs with bamboo ceilings and wood floors. The amazing thing is, the building was built with earth safe materials. There are also libraries all over, each section pertaining to the center that it’s in. In that particular building, there were sports books, yoga, and just general health and nutrition books.
The Wellness Center had a mediation room (the first one I ever saw), a dance studio, a gym which could also convert to an auditorium, and a cafeteria (which looked like those you would find in restaurants). The building also has bathrooms which are nicer then most peoples home ones, a pond with fish and a waterfall, and a huge restaurant style kitchen. The food that they use to serve comes from neighboring farms, and everything they purchase is either organic, in season (unless the produce was bought while in season and frozen by them), or freshly cooked.
The cafeteria offers a variety of food, from vegan to meat meals, although meat is almost never the main meal. They have a pizza oven in the cafeteria and you can pick your own toppings and it’s made right there in front of you. It was amazing.
That’s how school should be centered, not just because of the food (although that was a wonderful tasting) but around the complete wellbeing of students and teachers. If we were all more relaxed, or ate healthier, I think we’d be able to work and learn so much better. I hope that the Girls Club being built will follow a building structure close to that, I know it’s expensive but the payoffs would be greater. If the cost it too much for the budget, any building that follows the principle of the inhabitants well being will be beneficial.