The Awty International School

The Awty International School Student Center has redefined the heart of campus for the nation’s largest international school. The new Student Center celebrates the multicultural school community, catalyzes innovative STEM programming, and creates a fabric of sustainable landscapes within the compact urban campus. Biophilic strategies shaped the LEED Gold design, resulting in a building configuration that connects faculty and students to nature while incorporating resilient strategies that address a changing climate in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Serving as the campus hub for children from over 50 countries among its 1,800 students, the Awty International School Student Center transforms multiple scattered and aged structures into the campus heart, with a high-performance building and climate-wise landscapes. Students are welcomed to the Student Center by a series of rain gardens that lead to a generous outdoor dining porch fronting the courtyard.

The Student Center’s diversity of uses is reflected in the building’s broad range of space typologies which include indoor/outdoor dining, a multipurpose lecture hall, collaboration zones, group study rooms, STEM labs, academic classrooms, and active learning landscapes. The vibrant dining commons includes a variety of seating arrangements, and the open-style kitchen offers varied menu selections to entice the international student population.

Maximizing Outdoor Connections

A Phased Approach

A key goal of the project’s design was creating more contiguous and functional green space on the urban land-locked campus. Across two phases, the project team removed several underperforming one-story buildings and stacked the programs in a U-shaped, three-story building design. This campus-planning move creates a much larger, protected green space that incorporates native plants, supports local pollinators, shields inhabitants from noise pollution, and helps sustain healthy ecosystems.

Informal seating zones and breakout spaces in the Library and Dining Commons are connected to adjacent science labs and classrooms, encouraging group study, collaboration, and spontaneous interactions. These technology-enhanced areas foster a culture of inquiry and innovation among students.

Students observe daily the value of practicing environmental stewardship as they traverse the rain gardens featuring native plantings that support myriad local pollinators. The project’s site strategies thoroughly respond to the stormwater management requirements of Houston—requirements that more than doubled during the project’s design period, requiring imaginative, overlapping detention strategies.

Responding to Hurricane Harvey

Resilient Design

Hurricane Harvey brought unprecedented rainfall to the Houston area in 2017, causing 500-year flooding throughout the city. In 2018, when the design team began planning work for the Student Center, the realities of climate change and flood awareness were very present for all stakeholders. The resulting project prioritizes a resilient design that connects people to place, leverages passive design strategies, and supports the ecological health of the campus through a future-focused lens.

The building design addresses Houston’s benevolent late-fall through early spring climate and reconciles its warm, humid swing months with shaded outdoor spaces, deep overhangs, and breezeways that encourage natural ventilation. These features not only reduce reliance on mechanical systems but also connect students and faculty to nature, bolstering health and wellness.