THE SUITE LIFE MATT PEEK ’85 DESIGNS CATHEDRAL’S NEW SCIENCE SUITE BY MATT THIER ’00, Alumni Program Coordinator
nurtured throughout his Cathedral experience, and he credits his nine years at Cathedral for setting him on the path towards a career as an architect. Art and science class were the two venues where Mr. Peek was most able to explore his interests. “I remember some of my favorite science labs were where we created sectional drawings of various animals we dissected. I got very into it artistically even though it was a sort of science project. Drawing a crayfish was almost like drawing a spacecraft, right? It was a piece of architecture.” Art class was another area that left an impact on him. “We had an assignment, maybe in the sixth grade, where we had to paint a sort of smaller version of a still life. And so, I chose Cézanne and fell in love with Cubism,” a style of painting that is closely connected with architecture. Even today, Mr. Peek starts every workday with a 15-minute free-sketching session, a habit he developed in art class. He was also a chorister, and he points to his time in the choir as being an influence, especially the discipline that comes with rehearsing and performing. And the connection between singing in a group and designing buildings hasn’t been lost on him. “Choir is really sort of a perfect blend of art and science. Working in architecture is like being in the choir—we’re individ- ualists, but we’re also team players, where you’re listening to others and trying to echo them.” But more than his time in the classroom, it was the feeling of community that left a lasting impression on him, between singing in the choir, playing sports, and spending nine years together with his classmates. “I was a single child and grew up with a single mother, and so for me, Cathedral gave me that instant community. And I had a hard time finding that same kind of intense community, one that was spiritual and almost intangible, until after college.” When it came to designing the new science lab, Mr. Peek drew heavily on his memory of the school community and his experience as a student at Cathedral. The close connection that he felt with his classmates and teachers, especially his science teacher Bill Wright, is reflected in the layout of the room. Instead of individual desks, students will work at group tables, and teachers will have movable desks so they can float around the classroom to work with students and conduct experiments. With these arrangements, Mr. Peek says, “there’s an emphasis on collaborative learning, which I didn’t have until architectural school.” And much of the design details themselves, he says, “literally came from the teachers—it’s not a top-down design at all.” The Upper School science faculty, Ms. Murphy and Mr. Rahlson, met with Mr. Peek and volunteer parents multiple times to share their input about room layout, features, and
For Matt Peek ’85, designing Cathedral’s new Science Suite was as much about looking forward into the future as it was about reflecting on the past.
functional needs like storage space. And a best practices team, coordinated by colleague and parent Kath Tsakalakis, visited several schools around the area to learn about how they renovated their science centers. The end result of this process, Mr. Peek notes, “guarantees that the Science Suite was by the School and for the School.” While much of the inspiration for the classrooms came from Mr. Peek’s past, the fixtures and layout are rooted with an eye towards the future. The materials for the fixtures were chosen for their resiliency, sustainability, their long lifetimes, and non-toxic composition. And the LED lighting is both high-efficiency and designed to prevent eyestrain. “The idea is that resiliency through the choice of materials can help create resilient children and young adults.” One of Mr. Peek’s favorite features of the new Science Suite is the green wall, which will fill the outdoor space off of Sacramento Street and reach up to the roof. Combined with enlarging the classrooms and improving the lighting, Mr. Peek hopes to blur the lines between inside and outside and create a better learning environment—an effect that the trees in the old Veazie Court (the space between the school building and the Cathedral) had on him. “It takes me back to the cluster of pine trees next to the fifth-grade classroom. We’d be intensely studying with Mr. Rees, and at the same time you could smell the scent of the pines. There was that hard work balanced with nature, which was sort of sustaining you.” Mr. Peek’s balance of past influences with future aspirations is at the core of the Science Suite redesign. By embracing the past while keeping an eye on the future, Mr. Peek and Cathedral hope to create a space that will not only enable cutting-edge instruction and excellent learning outcomes, but that allows all students to discover and embrace their passions, whether those passions lie in the sciences, spaceship design, or elsewhere.
BEFORE
AFTER
THIS PAST SUMMER, WHILE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS WERE OFF ENJOYING THEIR VACATIONS, THE HALLS OF THE SCHOOL WERE FILLED WITH THE DUST AND NOISE THAT ACCOMPANIES ANY LARGE CONSTRUCTION PROJECT. On the Upper School floor, workers were busy gutting the Science Lab and Learning Center, sawing through concrete walls, and building out two new state-of-the-art science class- rooms known as the Science Suite—a project spearheaded and designed by Matt Peek ’85. Mr. Peek leads a successful professional life as a principal at Studio Peek|Ancona, the architecture firm he founded with his wife Renata Ancona in 1997. His work focuses on large-scale residential and commercial projects around the world with an emphasis on sustainability and climate resiliency, which has garnered him awards from the American Institute of Architecture and FEMA, as well as a Fulbright grant. When he’s not in the studio, Mr. Peek is also a professor, working with students at local universities like USF and Berkeley. But a career in architecture was not something that was preordained.
Mr. Rahlson and boys hatch-up experiments in the second room of the Science Suite. ("After" photo above: Ms. Murphy's lab.)
“Most architects always say that they were born knowing they want to be an architect.” For Mr. Peek (who was known as Matt Glaspell while attending Cathedral), that wasn’t exactly the case—“I thought I was going to design spacecraft,” he says, laughing. While rocket ships and interplanetary travel weren’t in his future, his interests in art, design, and science were
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