An Outdoor Classroom Built by Yellow Jackets
By: Jennifer Herseim | Categories: Alumni Interest
Just a short drive from campus is a classroom like no other, with a forest floor, a clear roof, and no walls. This outdoor space was created by Georgia Tech students and the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA) with help from more than a dozen alumni.
“Projects like this really show you the long-term impact of the work you’re doing,” says Christian Coles, Arch 16, a designer with CHASM Architecture and part-time lecturer in the School of Architecture, who served as an advisor to the project. “Georgia Tech in partnership with different organizations around Atlanta can truly make the city a force for good.”
The classroom, which includes design elements that honor the Bush Mountain neighborhood where it’s located, will foster community engagement and environmental education. It’s part of a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP), which brings together students and advisers from various disciplines to work on ambitious, multi-year projects with community partners around Atlanta.
Alumni Support
The WAWA Outdoor Classroom Project originated from a conversation between Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of Tech’s Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE), and Darryl Haddock, special projects director at WAWA. The goal of the project has been to seed the seven “petals,” or imperatives, of Georgia Tech’s living building—The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design—in surrounding neighborhoods.
“We wanted it to be a project that was about community leadership, and we wanted it to reflect the community’s history and their vision for the future,” Hirsch says.
From the beginning, alumni were eager to be involved.
The “magic” behind VIPs is the collaboration across academic areas, says Frank Wickstead, MS BC 11, part-time lecturer in the School of Building Construction and managing partner at Alair Buckhead. Wickstead served as the project’s lead construction advisor. “It should be part of the academic process to make students work with other disciplines and on real-world projects. That’s so valuable,” he says.
That type of collaboration wasn’t always the norm, adds Juan Archila, Arch 02, M Arch 04, Tech’s director of academic and research facilities infrastructure, who co-taught the VIP with Hirsch. “In my day, we were very siloed. It was only in the professional world where I started meeting fellow alumni who might have only been a class year before or after me,” he says.
Alumni were also key community partners. Janelle Wright, M CRP 23, an environmental justice programs manager, was the project’s lead from WAWA, which happens to be cofounded and run by alumna Na’Taki Osborne-Jelks, CE 98.
“The power of the VIP is to connect students and the community,” Wright says. “Building this structure in the forest serves as a way of addressing environmental inequity while also serving some of the needs we have as an organization to bridge people’s gaps into green space.”
Jimmy Mitchell, CE 05, sustainability manager for Skanska, was another project advisor and played a key role in helping students connect with industry partners that donated funding, materials, and time to the build. Mitchell was the project manager for the Kendeda Building. In addition to Skanska and Randall Brothers, industry partners included companies and organizations run by other alumni: Wickstead (Alair Buckhead); Kate Henry (Aulick Engineering), CE 08; Shannon Goodman (Lifecycle Building Center, cofounded by Goodman and Mitchell), MS Arch 98; Justis Brogan (McCarthy Building Companies), ME 04; Thomas Gambino (Prime Engineering), CE 79; and Bob Chambers (Smith Curie Oles), CE 79, MS CE 80.
Community Impact
Early on, the VIP team recognized the importance of the outdoor classroom reflecting the cultural heritage of the Bush Mountain neighborhood, a largely African American community that includes the historic practice fields that were once used by Atlanta’s Negro League baseball teams. Coles worked with students and WAWA to incorporate Afrofuturism into their approach. “The idea is to connect the past, present, and future through cultural innovation,” Coles says.
Markers along the pathway to the outdoor classroom will include oral histories, which share stories of the neighborhood and its history. “The richness of design, especially from an Afrocentric perspective, is to bring the community into it and allow their voices to be heard,” Coles adds.
A ribbon-cutting celebration April 12 was a full-circle moment that brought together alumni with recent graduates who had worked on the project and the students and community members who will see the outdoor classroom in use.
"At Georgia Tech, we’re about progress and service. We’re usually good at the progress side of things, but here’s an example of a service-based project, where the students really listened to what WAWA and the community wanted,” says Mitchell.
Visit the VIP project website for more information.
