High Tech High Los Angeles by Berliner and Associates

High Tech High Los Angeles by Berliner and Associates
Former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) school board president Roberta Weintraub founded the High Tech High-Los Angeles (HTH-LA) Foundation four years ago to build the first Los Angeles charter school to train students for the high-tech information careers of the future.

From the school's conception, Los Angeles-based Berliner and Associates, Architecture (BAA) worked with Weintraub and the LAUSD faculty to develop an open, flexible, and user-friendly learning environment specifically tailored to the school's progressive curriculum.

HTH-LA sits on a one-acre parcel in an underutilized corner of LAUSD's 71-acre Birmingham High School in suburban Van Nuys.

Two vacant warehouses on the Birmingham campus, donated to the HTH-LA Foundation, were gutted, seismically strengthened, and blended into a 27,000-square-foot fluid, self-contained structure by the addition of a large, geometrically playful glass volume.

The new school, accessed through Birmingham High (with shared parking spaces), is designed for 325 students, and includes eight classrooms, a prototype lab, a commons / library and great room, teachers' and administrators' offices, two conference rooms, and garden spaces.

Modeled after leading-edge corporate research centers, the school is a marriage of the educational and