Education

The award-winning outdoor classrooms at 4 different campuses, designed and built by Jonesplan and their design partner Good Fieldwork, include 21 different nature-based learning environments. At Kendall-Whittier, three existing playgrounds were converted into outdoor classrooms with features that include a custom wooden boardwalk, musical instruments and heavy kid-friendly landscaping. The Hawthorne campus also reimagines typical playgrounds as outdoor classrooms, with features such as custom mud kitchens, stages, teepee tunnels and nature art areas and also includes a separate raised bed garden with child-size planters. The MacArthur campus is also a reconstruction from playground to custom outdoor classrooms for each of its seven separate existing playgrounds and adds a separate bike path area with multiple riding surfaces through a "city" of concrete towers, over a ramp and bridge, and through a tunnel. Lastly, the Celia Clinton campus includes six ground-up outdoor classrooms at their flagship headquarters. The classrooms include a courtyard for non-mobile infants, custom features throughout, kid-friendly landscaping, and a dedicated interactive water play and biking education area.

The Chapman Green is a dramatic landscape intended to build student connections in the outside environment. JONESPLAN completed both general landscaping and irrigation for the award-winning project. Sustainability-conscious and state-of-the-art systems were used including Rain Bird’s RWS system and commercial drip valves, and products intended for long life cycles like decomposed granite mulch were incorporated. Safety-consciousness was highlighted by using non-rusting aluminum edging and duckbill root ball anchoring kits. CU-structural Soil developed by Cornell University allowed trees to be designed into the paving, and high-end site amenities were incorporated into the landscape’s features.

At TTC Owasso, a large recirculating water feature, a gathering plaza, and a five-tiered double-radius amphitheater were constructed to encourage social interactions at the existing campus. The water feature is a formal upper basin and fountain that leads through a limestone and river rock stream with multiple falls to a lower pond with three fountains. The gathering plaza includes an amphitheater built of segmental block retaining walls and decorative concrete bench seating, and formal placement of large-caliper cypress trees in structural CU-soil. Full landscape and irrigation of the entire site, 23 acres of sod, and multiple site amenities throughout the property were included. The TTC Sand Springs project was a large landscape, irrigation, and courtyard water feature project for a new Tulsa Technology Center facility. The central focus was the courtyard water feature consisting of a natural-edged flagstone surround with a decorative stone stream bed. Basalt columns were sourced for vertical water fountains, and a stone slab bridge, and limestone seating boulders were installed. The fountain system included lighting, recirculation, water level controls, and an in-ground mechanical vault to house the pump systems. The landscaping and irrigation scope included 128 trees, one which was a large specimen live oak for the courtyard, and a 16-zone irrigation system with extension sleeving for parking lot islands and courtyard plantings.

Description goThe Northeast Tech Pryor Entry Pond project required the reconstruction of an existing pond at the main entry onto the campus. Selected demolition at the pond's segmented retaining wall and apron was required in the areas that it was failing, and construction of a new concrete retaining wall and apron with a native sandstone veneer and cap was installed in its place. A 3-tiered concrete fountain structure was poured at the mouth of the pond to recirculate water, and lighting was added to accent the water at night.

Two outdoor classrooms were designed and built by JONESPLAN and their design partner, Good Fieldwork, and include features that represent the seven animals in the Otoe-Missouria creation story. Custom features include a tumble hill that leads up a beaver's dam climbing feature and to an eagle's nest, an elk rack climbing element and a pigeon perch climbing platform. Also included are a bear den built into the side of a grassy hill, a wooden shade structure, a water mister and bucket filler, grassland prairie raised beds, and other custom elements.