Shared Integrated Learning Center

Manitou Springs needed a shared home for art, drama, music, and computer science between its middle and high schools. The School Board wanted that practical solution to express something equally important: the identity of an artistic mountain community.

Nestled at the foot of Pikes Peak, Manitou Springs is a mountain community of artists and artisans. Teachers had walked daily between the middle and high schools to teach. The Shared Integrated Learning Center (ILC) would give them dedicated classrooms between the two schools.

The site was exceptionally small, the high school parking lot was already full, and creating room for the building required blasting away part of the mountain. We incorporated parking for teachers and administrators within the building itself. The covered garage met that daily need and became a social venue for students on weekends, hosting high school dances and music concerts.

CSNA organized the building to give each use an appropriate place. We proposed locating the administration offices on the main floor, sheltered by a colonnade with unobstructed views of Pikes Peak for administrators and visiting parents. The District also embraced our recommendation to place the large classrooms for computer science, drama, and music on the second floor.

For a community of artists and artisans, art deserved a special connection to the setting. We placed the art classrooms on the upper floor beside an outdoor deck, where students could paint the mountain landscape en plein air. A glass-lined hallway offers views of Manitou Springs nestled at the base of Pikes Peak.

A permanent home enriched teaching and learning. Teachers shaped their classrooms with posters, playful furniture, and displays of student work, making the walls themselves part of the teaching experience. Work by high school students offered inspiration to middle school students, and the exchange worked both ways. Music classrooms provided a lasting home for pianos, timpani, tubas, and xylophones. With their materials and instruments in place, teachers could cultivate learning environments that grew with their students.

The Board’s ambition to express the community’s artistic character invited CSNA to think as sculptors, envisioning the building as a block of clay with openings slashed as though with a sculptor’s ribbon tool. At the north-facing entrance, a five-sided glass hood shelters the cascading stair from mountain downdraft winds. Students and teachers moving through it animate an ever-changing piece of performance art. By night, it glows above the town, a beacon celebrating the arts.

Visible from the highway, this unexpected entrance prompts surprise when passersby discover that the building is a school. Its practical purpose and touch of whimsy give architectural expression to Manitou Springs’ creative spirit.

Teachers gained a permanent home, students found inspiration in one another’s work, and even the parking garage became a place to gather. Shaped by its mountain setting and artistic community, the Shared Integrated Learning Center makes room for learning and gives creativity a visible home.

Architecture as Identity: the Manitou Springs story.