Success Academy Charter School and Education Institute, Hudson Yards NYC
Category
Product > furniture: education
Description
Company Name
Biber Architects and Armada
Company URL
www.biber.co
Description
At the Success Academy’s Education Institute (SA Ed Institute) teachers from NYC and around the country are trained in the pedagogy so successfully deployed by the charter school. These intensive sessions include breakouts and work sessions of various sizes in the open public areas outside seminar and lecture halls.
The problem to solve was how to configure and reconfigure these informal work areas as small, medium and large groups and even to clear the area entirely for events and large gatherings. The defined work areas had to focus attention and screen peripheral distractions and provide some sound and visual isolation.
Our solution is the InterAct Wall; a set of foldable, rolling curved-corner walls with writeable magnetic surfaces. The walls can be arranged in groups as a cruciform, or as pairs of U-shaped dividers or as a single room defined at its corners, among a myriad other configurations.
Technically, the walls are 82" high, and only 29” wide when folded allowing them to roll into the nearby elevators. They unfurl into a total of over 11’ wide when fully deployed. They are both easy to fold and unfold, and are stable at any position due to the frame and caster design. The solidity of the walls provide stable writing surfaces and reflect sound back to the audience, allowing lower speaking volumes and less sound crossover.
The InterAct Walls are a universal solution to a ubiquitous problem; how to use large open areas, so common today in open plan offices, schools and shared work areas, in temporary custom arrangements. There are, of course, many temporary elements in use today, including flat white boards, paper easels, fabric wrapped panels and more elaborate stacked walls.
None of the alternatives are as substantial, as portable and as effective in creating useful work areas. Most are too flimsy to be anything but a partially visual screen, few have the mass to effectively reflect sound, rarely is the entire surface writable and none have the elegance of the curved interior corner to provide an enormous 90 sf of continuous usable work surface. This is more than twice the surface area of the largest portable white boards, including those that flip over to reveal a second surface.
The InterAct wall is a solution for the modern workspace. We live in a world of open desking and closed conference spaces. InterAct is a way to create viable hybrid work spaces; neither closed and limited by size, nor open and undefined.
Product Video
InterAct Wall