Most school buildings contain space that time has passed by. For some districts, these rooms sit quietly at the edge of the budget, neither serving students nor getting replaced. Other schools may need to inhabit a new space entirely, with an eye toward optimizing their existing programs or building out new ones.
Transformative architectural solutions flow from the specific circumstances of the existing building, as well as the school’s underlying philosophy for the way students should learn, collaborate, and gather outside the classroom. With these elements in mind, KSS Architects has worked closely with schools and districts to develop a living framework for elevating facility assets into their best and highest use.
Nowhere is the need greater than in cross-curricular science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) programming. As districts prepare students for an increasingly complex and technology-driven world, demand for hands-on, interdisciplinary environments has evolved as quickly as the vision for the spaces themselves.
Two projects — the New Hope-Solebury School District STEAM Wing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the University Academy Charter High School STEAAM Suite in Jersey City, New Jersey (where there added A stands for Agriculture) —highlight both the diversity of learning spaces and the breadth of innovative solutions under five tried-and-true principles for repurposed design.
Two Schools, Two Contexts
New Hope-Solebury is a small, high-performing suburban school district of approximately 1,300 K-12 students, spread across three buildings, two of which share a campus. The high school’s multimodal STEAM Wing required a total transformation of 4,500 square feet of high school space reclaimed from a redundant nurse’s suite, an outdated computer lab, and a former darkroom. The renovated space, opened in 2023, houses a robotics lab and arena, collaboration lab, digital fabrication lab, video production area, material cave, maker space, and wood shop, supporting classes and setting a standard for STEAM programming which has since expanded into a district-wide initiative.
University Academy is a 460-student charter high school in Jersey City built around a service-learning model: every class takes on a service project, and seniors complete a capstone. The school occupies a century-old industrial building, originally a commercial laundry, that KSS first renovated more than 20 years ago. When the university partner that shared the building began consolidating its real estate, University Academy seized the opportunity to expand into a raw, open second floor with exposed steel trusses, brick walls, and a structural configuration that made for both compelling design opportunity and real construction complexity. The STEAAM Suite covers roughly 9,600 square feet and is currently being phased in.
The two projects, very different in their setting and challenges, share something more fundamental than a design approach. In both cases, we started with an underutilized space, a school with a clear vision for its students, and a defined process of engaging the students who would inhabit the space.
The five principles that emerged from that approach are not a formula so much as a way of working, one that produces results specific to each school precisely because it fully assesses each space on its own terms.
- Work With What You Have
The most economical renovation is usually the most architecturally honest one. At New Hope-Solebury, the existing footprint was a long, linear series of spaces along a single corridor. Rather than working against that geometry, the design used it as the organizing idea. A wide central “street,” finished in the school’s blue and yellow, runs the full length of the wing, with each program area — robotics lab, digital fabrication lab, video production space, material cave, maker space — opening off it. Standing anywhere in the corridor, you can see the whole wing alive at once.
At University Academy, the challenge was a massive mechanical shaft running through the center of an otherwise open floor, far too costly to remove. The design made it the spatial anchor instead, organizing the entire floor around it, with an active maker space and robotics area on one side and a quieter, focused zone for small-group work on the other. The building’s industrial character was emphasized rather than concealed, with a bold palette of rust red and blue.
In both cases, working with the existing building rather than against it also redirected budget toward the things that matter most to students.
- Invite Students Into the Process, and Keep Them There
A space designed without the voices of the people who will actually use it tends to feel that way. At New Hope-Solebury, the STEAM Wing was itself a product of the district’s year-long strategic planning process. When it opened, the design team returned for the inaugural STEAM Expo and set up a VR station where students could walk through the architectural model before stepping around the corner to see the finished wing. Students later used the wing’s CNC machine to design and wire the illuminated signage now hanging in the space — skills most wouldn’t encounter until college or unless they engaged in specialized trade programs.
At University Academy, the design team met with students in the school gym and ran open-ended exercises around questions about creativity, collaboration, and learning. What came back was specific: students wanted to learn to sew, start businesses, grow food and donate it locally. The STEAAM Suite’s agricultural growing station exists because students asked for it. That kind of involvement builds ownership that no floor plan can manufacture after the fact.
- Transparency Sparks Collaboration and Curiosity
Making spaces visible to each other — through glass walls, open adjacencies, and corridor windows — is one of the most effective investments in both projects. It creates the conditions for curiosity and cross-pollination without requiring any formal scheduling.
At New Hope-Solebury, windows along the main hallway mean students passing between classes can see the wing in motion before they’ve decided to enter. Movable glass walls between zones let teachers close off space for focused work or open the whole wing for competitions and community events.
At University Academy, the physics lab sits directly adjacent to the maker space, separated by an operable partition. A student at a fabrication bench can watch a lab experiment underway a few feet away, and a physics teacher can extend hands-on work into the maker space when the lesson calls for it. That adjacency also does something subtler: it makes science and engineering look like activities that happen in welcoming, interesting places, which matters for the student who wouldn’t otherwise picture herself there.
- Design for How Students Learn
Students don’t work the same way in every situation, and a space built around only one mode of engagement will serve most of them poorly most of the time. At New Hope-Solebury, the wing supports formal instruction, independent exploration, and social learning within a single connected footprint. The material cave, with its open shelving and informal seating, invites students to browse and get curious about each other’s projects. The esports space, home to the district’s new JV and varsity teams, draws in students who might not have found a home in traditional school activities, while building communication and strategic thinking that carry over into academics.
At University Academy, the Toolbox makes this legible in plan. One side is built for active, collaborative, hands-on work, while the other provides the quiet focus that high schoolers need but rarely find in open environments. Students can take a relaxed, restorative break and return to class with the energy and focus needed to tackle their assignments. The two lab spaces, meanwhile, are equally dynamic, with interchangeable infrastructure built into the design so that enrollment shifts between biology and chemistry can be absorbed without renovation.
- Build Spaces to Change with the World
The fabrication tools at the center of many STEAM programs today barely existed 15 years ago, and the programs themselves keep shifting. A space optimized for today’s specific technologies will feel dated before the building does, which is why both projects prioritize flexibility in the infrastructure.
At New Hope-Solebury, STEAM enrollment surged in the wing’s first four months, and what began as a high school initiative has since expanded from the high school, down to the district’s middle school and elementary school as well. At University Academy, the design team conducted post-occupancy surveys with more than 100 students in the space’s first year of operation — asking how they used it, what they valued, what they wished were different. The results were telling. Students who spent at least an hour a week in the space described it in terms of belonging and inspiration as readily as they described its equipment and programs. The open-ended responses pointed to a sense of ownership that the more structured program data couldn’t fully capture.
Post-occupancy assessment closes the feedback loop between design intent and lived experience, and in educational environments it can directly inform curriculum development, scheduling, and future capital investments. At New Hope-Solebury, the district has already expanded the programming to all ages of students. At University Academy, the survey findings are actively shaping how administrators and teachers think about programming the space going forward.
Measuring how students actually inhabit a space turns a completed project into a living body of knowledge. It’s the difference between a renovation that feels successful on opening day and one that continues to serve students as their needs evolve. What both schools have shown is that when the design process is as thoughtful as the educational vision it serves, the spaces will achieve the best experiences and outcomes for students, long after the ribbon is cut.