Our design for Brownell Middle School balances creating outdoor spaces for play, gathering, and teaching. These occur in a variety of settings including semi-circular concrete seat walls surrounding central areas for instruction, to wide concrete patios outside maker space garage doors inside classroom pods. Carducci is pleased that these spaces will play a crucial role in keeping students and staff safe, while enriching student learning opportunities. A diverse palette of native, drought tolerant, and pollinator-friendly shrubs and grasses strengthens our biophilic concept and almost 200 shade trees were planted to passively cool the site. Brownell also benefits from entirely new natural turf playing fields with more efficient, modern irrigation.