Newport High School

Bellevue, WA

NAC | Architecture
Bellevue School District

Creating Spaces Conducive to Learning and Expression

Newport High School is a 222,000 square foot, 9-12 high school with approximately 1,600 students and 100 faculty members.  The $54,000,000 three-story building, completed in 2008, features new classrooms, library and administrative areas connected by a pedestrian walkway to a newly remodeled gym, theater and technology center.

Challenges:

The school needed a comprehensive audio/visual system system for the commons, theater, gymnasium and music rooms.  The music students needed rooms that both the choir and the band could practice in.  Band and choir practice spaces are very different spaces for acoustical treatment.  One requires low reverberation and the other requires high reverberation.

Solutions:

The music rooms were designed to be tunable spaces that could serve both band and choir practices.  Cabinets were designed that when closed would provide a very reverberant and diffuse field and when open provide a significant reduction in the reverberation time by having dense fiberglass panels.

History:

NAC | Architecture is an architecture, electrical engineering, interior design and planning firm with expertise in education, healthcare and community recreation.  In our years of business, SSA has been invited to provide acoustical design recommendations on over twenty K-12 schools by NAC.