CAROLINA FRIENDS SCHOOL

Durham, NC | Photography by Mike Cincala

A client-architect relationship spanning 30 years has produced three master planning cycles and more than dozen new buildings, additions, and renovations. The aim throughout has been to make the Friends’ 25-acre wooded campus a better environment for life and learning, for students and teachers, for indoor and outdoor spaces. Building projects range from a two-room addition to the Lower school, to a library/art building for the Middle and Upper schools, to a gymnasium and ball fields, and, most recently, to a 350-seat theater with indoor and outdoor performance places. Sustainable strategies such as natural daylight, geo-thermal heating and cooling, and solar water heating are included across the campus as teaching examples that reflect the Friends’ concern to be good stewards. In accord with another Friends’ tenet -- that individuals are heard and grow through community -- all the work at Friends School has resulted from a consensus-based design process.