Architectural imagination and social conscience are intertwined in the design for Diamond Ranch High School. It is a public high school with 50 classrooms, a gymnasium, cafeteria, administration and parking for 770 automobiles. Total cost for school was $30 million USD. The building presents a detailed story of the design and construction of a single building, by Morphosis. The presentation is a state-of-the-art public school in Pomona, California, offers a level of detail not normally found in architectural monographs.

Designed by Morphosis, principal architect Thom Mayne, the Diamond Ranch High School is an advanced solution of educational space, where the architects have tried to combine aesthetic beauty with a sense of social mission. The building is on a site that was considered too steep to build on with a gradient rising from 1:1 to 1:5. Morphosis took advantage of the changes in gradient to create a series of buildings and playing fields where the architecture and topography interact. The site provided an opportunity to create a place where architecture and environment continually exchange places, fusing landscape and building into a single organic unity.

As the architect Thom Mayne said, “It was our intention to create a building which is previewed as one with the site, rather than on top of the site.” Morphosis attempted indeed to create a coherent continuity between the building and the landscape. Outdoor sports areas are at the top and bottom of the hill, with two rows of buildings and a pedestrian street in between. The land was shaped in conjunction with the architecture to minimize the displacement of earth; the sitting of the project took advantage of a natural bowl for the playing field and primary football field, embedding them in the slope at the south of the site. The gymnasium to the east mimics the hillside with a pitched roof that undulates with the terrain.

The desire to take advantage of the site’s potential, the building was joined by other two main themes on which the planners have focused: the social organization and the educational flexibility. The first aim was to create a dynamic built environment that enables social interaction between students, teachers, administration and the community. The second aim was the flexibility of the teaching environments, allowing different methods of education with different levels of intimacy: the classrooms are divided into six separate clusters, creating “schools within schools” where various types and sizes of communal spaces can be found, giving a greater sense of personal attention and responsibility.

The simplicity of the building belies the complexity of interconnections between the buildings and communal spaces. Fractured geometries step down the hill, defining the circulation path for the whole complex and at times reaching across the pedestrian street to form outdoor enclosures. Buildings connect and pull apart, an appropriate architecture for a high school filled with young adults. The tectonic language echoes both the nearby mountains and the seismic faults that define the region.

Either the building is form follows function or vice versa, this project definitely takes the formal part, moving away from the early modernistic tendencies to sort out the functional questions as if the form didn’t matter. Yet, an evident tension can be found between the natural-geometric concrete forms and the mechanical elements from steel. The use of those steel structural materials recalls the essence of the modernist movement and enriches the language of the project.

This public commission had to offer value for money so the powerful massing make the most of a simple palette of cost-effective materials. The architecture weaves together the kind of formal experimentation for which Morphosis is known, with a socially informed idea of what kind of environment a school should provide: edifying, complex, expansive. And finally, there is the hope that something from the joyful play of spaces and volumes will influence the process of learning in this school. Like the architecture which is dynamic and ‘happy’ but still functional, the education can be colorful and enjoyable yet still efficient.

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