After a successful community campaign and bid to purchase their historic building, Harding Fine Arts Academy engaged Gardner to provide a design solution that will upgrade the existing campus in order to better serve the students of today. The three core goals of the site programming include (1) historic preservation, (2) analysis of existing building code/accessibility, compliance, and recommendations to rectify areas of noncompliance, and (3) program building and exterior spaces to enable Harding to be the premier arts integration high school.

Paramount to this project is creating a space that fosters student collaboration via flexible spaces that encourage spontaneous interactions—all while signaling the institution’s arts focus to the community.