The PA School for the Deaf moved to its current location, the former Germantown Academy in 1984. The neighborhood has a strong historic residential presence and the streets are lined with sidewalks and trees. Though fairly flat, the campus sits up several feet from West Coulter Street, and most of the campus vehicular and pedestrian circulation is located behind the main academic buildings creating conflicts and safety issues between pedestrians and buses. Newer campus buildings, the gymnasium and the early education center provide anchors to campus edges. The Campus planning team met with the PA School for Deaf’s Board of Trustees and Stakeholders to learn more about their needs as a campus and community. BDG researched Deafspace design guidelines as outlined by Hansel Bauman, and Alexa Vaughn, as well as stormwater opportunities the campus may leverage to create multi-layered landscape spaces that 1) Provide safety and access, 2) Support members of the Deafspace community with spaces scaled for visual communication and emotional recognition 3) Reduce the stormwater tax burden through Philadelphia specific stormwater features. In this approach the large scale of campus is broken into a series of nested spaces that utilize deaf space principles to facilitate the ease of signing, reading, and navigating with peripheral vision.

ARCHITECT: DRA Architects