The San Francisco Day School, a K–8 independent school for 400 children, successfully integrates a re-purposed structure and several new expansions into an attractive and functional campus of harmonious urban buildings and outdoor spaces. Challenged to find an appropriate central city location for this new co-ed day school, the Trustees bought an existing mortuary building on a 1-acre site.

Our first project was to remodel the existing Spanish style building into the upper school with a full complement of variously sized classrooms, art studios and library. We then made a major classroom addition to the north that was built while the school was occupied. The third phase included the addition of a new cafeteria and kitchen and a 5,500 gross square foot middle school gymnasium that doubles as a theater for the school’s many theatrical productions. The roof is used for outdoor play. A fourth phase was the expansion and reinvention of the school’s burgeoning and newly electronic library.

We designed the gymnasium/theater complex to accommodate both uses without compromise. Manually operated bleachers along the longitudinal walls serve athletic events and a motorized bank of theater seats and stage unfold from the opposing transverse walls. Due to the speed and convenience of motorized black-out shades and basketball backboards, the building can be converted from gymnasium to theater in less than ten minutes.

Notably, San Francisco Day School is recognized not only as an important educational institution in San Francisco, but as one of the most successful urban models of institutional development within a residential neighborhood.