Renovating With Paint

Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Brooklyn was recently renovated using only paint. This project was completed by Pentagram, with help from the original architects of the building, Rogers Marvel Architects. Below are some excerpts from the post at Pentagram's website.

"Character building is the foundation of Endeavor’s teaching philosophy, and the environmental graphics at the school have been inspired by a series of motivational slogans used by its teachers. Achievement First originally produced these slogans—“All of us will learn,” “Whatever it takes,” etc.—as colorful stickers that students were encouraged to affix to their books and lockers. Scher has enlarged these into supergraphics that help define the interior spaces. The graphics appear as a series of equations (“Education = Choice,” “Education = Freedom”) in the halls, quotations running around the perimeter of the gymnasium, and most noticeably, climbing the main staircase at a front of the school, where they are visible through windows to the street. As in the program Scher designed for the school of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, the Endeavor graphics become part of the architecture and help the building become a participant in the learning process: celebrating language, “talking” to students, encouraging them to do better, creating a unique environment they can call their own."

"All of this was accomplished with little expense. As every homeowner knows, paint can be a simple and economical solution for transforming a space. At Endeavor the process required thorough planning. Using the existing color palette, Scher and her team applied the colors to a scale model of the school to conceive of the patterns and placement for specific installations. In rooms like the cafeteria, the bands of color are used to define and enhance the architecture, creating an illusion of depth that expands the space. In other areas, the painting of typography, set in Rockwell, is intricate and detailed."