Cornerspring Montessori
Middle School – The Annex
ABOUT
Client Private School
Typology Institutional
Location Maine
Year 2021
Design Team Matthew O’Malia, Riley Pratt, Addison Godine
Contractor OPAL BUILD
Consultants Mechanical Engineer: Andrew McPartland,
Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti
Photography Josh Gerritsen Media
EUI 17.72 kBTU/SF/yr
Awards
AIA Maine, 2019 Honor Award
OPAL worked with Cornerspring Montessori School in expanding its facilities to accommodate a thriving middle school program. Part of a site master plan OPAL developed for the 35-acre campus in Belfast, Maine, the freestanding 1,000-square-foot building, reflects Cornerspring’s ethos of environmental awareness and sustainability, its embrace of technological innovation, and its vision of Montessori education in a post-pandemic world.Enclosing two classrooms joined by a common entry, coatroom, and bathroom, the Annex design shares the main school building’s form and materials—along with its Passive House-level energy performance—while establishing a modest physical distance appropriate to the growing independence of the middle school years. The flexible, makerspace-like floor plan responds both to Montessori pedagogy and to lessons learned during the past year of shifting health protocols.
Among those lessons is the virtue—and occasional necessity—of responding nimbly to change. In that spirit, the new building employs advances pioneered by OPAL and its affiliated companies, Timber HP and OPAL Build, which increased the speed, precision, and quality of building construction while reducing on-site construction time, site disturbance, and project carbon footprint. Our system of prefabricated construction combines the emerging technologies of cross-laminated timber and wood fiber insulation in prefabricated, all-wood panels that are quickly assembled to provide the structure, thermal insulation, and interior finish for an entire building envelope.
Co-located with Timber HP in the Madison factory, OPAL Build creates its next-generation wood-composite building panels by laminating layers of CLT and WFI (Wood Fiber Insulation). Machinery guided by data exported from a 3D computer design model precisely cuts the CLT/WFI laminate into structural wall and roof panels, in which windows and doors are preinstalled. The finished panels are delivered to the site and quickly and efficiently assembled on an insulated concrete slab foundation to create a weathertight building shell. The solid-wood finish layer of the CLT is exposed on the building’s interior, creating a healthy, durable, and visually rich environment.
