Portland State Magazine Winter 2013

16 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE WINTER 2013 Too many students? It’s off to the portable classroom, but this one is something special. A kinder, greener classroom TO GO TO SCHOOL , kindergartners and first-graders in Gervais, Oregon, have to take a bus six miles out of town to a remote building in an apple orchard. The daily trip is too long for the children and too expensive for the small, rural school district north of Salem. But the superintendent, Rick Hensel, thought he couldn’t afford to build a new school closer to home—unless he bought cheap, boxy, inefficient portables. The solution came from an unexpected place: Portland State’s Architecture Department. Professors Margarette Leite and Sergio Palleroni and their students have designed and built the first affordable, green portable classroom, and Gervais School District is their first customer. What started as a design exercise in a PSU studio could transform the $5 billion modular classroom industry and improve the health and academic achievement of countless students now placed in overcrowded and dilapidated schools. National distributors are already lining up to sell the class- rooms to interested buyers from San Jose to St. Louis, with a small part of the income returning to Portland State. Leite and Palleroni’s SAGE (Smart Academic Green Environment) classroom lets in at least twice the natural light, circulates three times as much air, and consumes half the energy of a standard portable classroom. For the Gervais School District, the new classroom elimi- nated the biggest obstacle to green construction: high price. “Any way we can make a healthier environment, logic tells you that’s the way to go,” says Hensel, the superintendent. “But it really comes down to dollars.” The SAGE classroom costs about $75,000—20 percent more than standard portables in Portland—but saves money over time by using less energy. Other green modular class- rooms are at least four times as much. “Every school district in the country could conceivably afford this classroom,” says Palleroni. “It’s a dramatic paradigm shift from what exists now.” THE FIRST PROTOTYPE was unveiled in November outside the entrance of San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center for Greenbuild 2012, the world’s largest green building expo. The project won a 2013 international SEED award for excellence in public interest design. WR I T T E N B Y SUZANNE PARD I NGTON It’s bright, it’s airy, and it’s portable. This modular classroom designed by Portland State Architecture faculty was on display at the Greenbuild Expo in San Francisco during November. Photos by Susana Bates.