July, 2019 - ASHS Additions and Renovations Blog

As the summer continues over at Abington Senior High School, the hallways and classrooms are becoming less and less recognizable as the renovations progress. In many areas, the inside is now outside, as demolition work advances in what will be the expanded administrative area and the interdisciplinary wing, where the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center for Science and Technology will connect to the existing Senior High building (in addition to also connecting via the current science wing).

See if you can guess where the following photos were taken (scroll to the bottom of the post for answers)!

Answers:

(A) – Looking into the Auditorium lobby/Audion hallway and the former administrative/guidance office area

(B) – Looking at the library entrance and mailroom

(D) – The Audion

(E) – The Auditorium Lobby

Look up! In the past week or two at Abington Senior High School, not only are the steel beams climbing higher, but the construction of a retaining wall visible from Highland Avenue offers one of the first markers of how Abington Senior High School will look by 2022. As shown in the primary rendering used in the Additions and Renovations Project, the retaining wall is a preliminary glimpse at the pieces of the puzzle coming together.

The stone wall is meant to help hold back the hillside of the sloped property, and as you can see in the rendering above, it will have landscaped trees planted all around. The road pictured in the rendering is meant to serve as a receiving road, primarily for use of facilities vehicles to be able to access the building’s utilities room.

Sitting alongside Highland Avenue and at the foot of the hillside, underground infiltration basins were installed before the wall was constructed. The underground infiltration basin stores storm water that was collected by storm drains and roof drains to allow the water to percolate back into the ground in lieu of flowing directly into the storm water system and local streams.

There are a total of five infiltration basins and one rain garden designed in the project, with three of the basins serving the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center for Science and Technology. The underground infiltration basins are constructed of a maze of plastic crates that allow water to collect underground and leech back into the ground slowly. If the underground basin fills, the water is released slowly into the storm water system.

The future Abington Senior High School is designed to have less storm water leaving the site after construction than before construction started.

Month: July 2019

Inside Out

Things are Looking Up