Tour & Dinner Presentation

SAAS – Home of the Upper School

Thursday, January 15, 2026
Tour: 4:30 – 5:30 pm PT
Dinner/Presentation: 6:00 – 8:00 pm PT

The new Home of the Upper School is a 5-story academic building for grades 9-12 at the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences. The recent completion of the project unifies this Middle School and Upper School campus on one urban block in Capital Hill, Seattle, and connects the campus buildings through a large inner-block courtyard and gathering space. The new building offers SAAS students a range of coveted innovation spaces—wood shop, metal shop, digital fabrication studio, maker classrooms and music production suites. A series of connected student community spaces step up through all five levels, providing a diversity of environments to connect, engage and decompress, each offering a different scale and style and social opportunity and informal learning. The largest student commons is supported by a commercial kitchen and servery for lunch and events. Three upper levels of classrooms include natural ventilation and abundant daylight, and are interspersed with faculty and administration offices, accommodations, and learning support spaces. The project operates fossil-fuel free, with a high-performance building envelope, rooftop solar arrays, vegetated roofs, bioretention planters, and includes native and indigenous species gardens.

Learning Objectives:

• We will share how the new Innovations core curriculum at SAAS informed the building program, and how we developed a mix of hands-on making and digital fabrication shops to support diverse learning styles and curricular goals.
• We will share lessons learned from the development of an educational garden, incorporating input from a tribal consultant on indigenous botany and knowledge, and with narrative and interpretive signage around the indigenous food forest and edible plants. We will share our process and outcomes with the group, and how we engaged teachers in the process and for future curricular development.
• We will share lessons learned through faculty feedback with manually operated classroom windows vs indicator control lights from the Middle School building design to the Upper School design.
• We will discuss strategic adjacencies between classrooms, social spaces, and faculty/admin offices to provide student-owned spaces that can be passively supervised by adults in a non-intrusive manner.

Project Team:
Architect of Record: LMN Architects
Landscape Architect: Swift Company
Structural & Civil Engineer: CPL
Electrical & Mechanical Engineer: PAE
Contractor: BNBuilders
Specialized Consultants: Innovations Shop Spaces – Sarah Smith of Sawhorse Revolution; Indigenous Botanist – Valerie Segrest
Owner: Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences

Tour Guide:
Kate Westbrook, Principal, LMN Architects

Schedule:

4:30 – 5:30 pm	Tour SAAS – Home of the Upper School 1120 12th Avenue Seattle, WA 98122 View Parking Map »
6:00 – 8:00 pm	Dinner Georgetown Ballroom 5623 Airport Way South Seattle, WA 98108

Rates:

Private Firm Member	$70 / $80
Private Firm Non-Member	$90 / $100
School Districts / Government Agency	$35

Please register so we can get an accurate head count.

Registration closes on January 12.
Early bird registration closes on January 2.

We greatly appreciate your attendance and active participation in our chapter events.