Berchmans Academy Gymnasium
A new gymnasium and dining facility that anchors the new all-boys campus for Berchmans Academy of the Sacred Heart. Sited across an iconic oak alley on the historic Academy of the Sacred Heart two-hundred-year-old campus, the building takes cues from the historic campus, with a nine-degree rotation that aligns with it. Materials are chosen for their ability to evolve with the landscape, such as a Zalmag (a zinc-aluminum-magnesium alloy) shingled facade.
Gymnasium Programming
The plan organizes the building around two primary spaces: a full gymnasium floor supporting basketball, volleyball, and multi-sport use, and a dining and flex space that expands the building's daily program beyond athletics. Both are served by a shared core of concessions, restrooms, locker rooms, coaches' offices, and an entry lobby. These also serve the nearby baseball, football, and soccer fields and is places towards the south to be adjacent to these fields. The nine-degree rotation off the street grid is legible in the plan. The slight angular shift that keys the building to the historic campus geometrically and gives the overall composition its quiet tension.
The gymnasium presents itself as a jewel box on the landscape. It's ZalMag cladding catching and shifting with the light throughout the day, a season, or a change in weather. A slight opening in the façade cracks the box, offering a glimpse into the interior where the school colors of the bleachers register from across the grounds. A breezeway runs the length of the front elevation, forming a front porch - harkening to local vernacular types - where students and parents can gather on built-in benches; the lower portion is fully glazed, so life inside remains visible from the outside. The building is approached across a rainwater garden planted with native swamp species and acts as a buffer from the parking area and frames the arrival sequence.
The gymnasium is the first mass timber gym in Louisiana, with its structure built from regionally sourced Southern yellow pine glulam, expressed overhead with a full wood ceiling and half-bow trusses that introduce a slight curve to the ceiling. The curved wood ceiling is designed to improve acoustics through a mixture of absorption in the wood material and reflection at slightly different angles from the curve. A clerestory above the bleachers daylights the space by throwing light deeper into the structure, while a continuous glazing of the "front porch" wall on the opposite side maintains the visual and physical connection between the gym floor and the outdoors; a relationship central to the school's ethos.
Front Porch Breezeway
Standing on the front porch breezeway, which echoes local building typologies and the historic Academy of the Sacred Heart main building, the building reveals itself a multilayered. Inside, the bleachers, the sidelines, and the court stacks in succession. Spectators, circulation, and play layering. The glazed porch wall dissolves the boundary, extending that layering outward to the breezeway seating, then across the lawn as it gently slopes to the rainwater garden planted with native species, and finally, the parking area beyond.