Westminster Academy

memphis, tn

Westminster Academy is a K-12 classical Christian school that shares a campus with an existing non-affiliated church building.  Hord Architects was hired in 2017 as part of Westminster Academy’s feasibility study to provide a building assessment of the educational portion of the campus.   The buildings, their structure and mechanical systems were evaluated on their physical condition and life cycle, their life safety compliance for educational use, and accessibility requirements.

Subsequently, Hord Architects was tasked to provide a master plan that tied four existing buildings from different decades into a unified campus that presented a clearly identifiable school façade, that respected the hierarchy of an attached but distinct church building and allowed for barrier free access between the individual buildings.  The masterplan included site and traffic design, renovation to existing facilities and new construction of administration space, a library, and classrooms along with a two-story space that serves as a welcome area and semi-public forum.

Noble simplicity describes how the school addresses and relates to the public realm and how it respects the hierarchy and importance of the adjacent church.  It also expresses the goal of school’s vision of education, which is: to produce young men and women of noble character and modest excellence.  The language of the classical architecture aims to express that Beauty is the tangible and overflowing evidence of Goodness and Truth, and that the environment of education is an important heuristic towards that Christian pedagogy.