A recent expansion of a semi-rural Illinois campus is designed to combine middle or junior highs on the same campus as the high schools they feed into, but with separate entrances and other physical boundaries. To ensure the school maintained a single identity across its varied facilities, designers opted for a bold signage system of painted perforated corrugated metal that also adds color to a traditionally neutral exterior palette.
The Williamsville-Sherman Community Unit School District No. 15 serves students from its namesake villages on the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois, with approximately 1,450 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
Williamsville-Sherman had already combined seventh and eighth grades with the existing junior-senior campus. The recent expansion added fifth and sixth grades to the existing junior high facility, adding a new wing for fifth graders. New amenities, like a multi-use theater and band and choral areas, along with athletic upgrades, also were included.
Junior and senior athletic programs have different team names, but they use the same purple and yellow colors. So, designers with Decatur, Illinois-based BLDD Architects incorporated these colors as part of the campus-wide identity program. Large, perforated screens of corrugated aluminum are painted with abstracted purple and yellow stripes and installed over glass curtainwall windows at the building’s corners. These splashes also provide contrast to the neutral concrete and masonry materials that dominate the building’s façades.
The building team, which also included installers with CAD Construction, Tremont, Illinois, specified Petersen to supply the screen, the architects had had success with previous screens using Petersen’s PAC-CLAD products. In all, 2,200 square feet of PAC-CLAD 7.2 Perforated Corrugated panels were specified in the company’s Stone White finish, to which the bright school colors were applied.
