Our inquiry in to the Middle School program in Sunset Park is to approach the school as an ‘operational infrastructure for education and community service’ rather than an anachronistic understanding of the middle school as an architectural representation of public institution. This emphasis on operational and organizational aspects of education allows for full participation in the need and desire for adaptable spaces and open ended systems interplay in education. The middle school is seen as a ‘re-writable surface and volume for the process of education’, an ‘emergent educational field as contoured landscape’. Providing for dynamical and combinative modes of time based programming, promoted by gradient variations of ‘attitudinal qualitative cultures’ of forms, spaces, and scales. The middle school is seen as a ‘social condenser’ of the community enhanced and augmented by athletic, performance, and theatre arts programs allowing access to the school and the neighborhood, during and beyond the school day.
