Located in San Diego’s East County, this 32-acre, $38 million school was designed with a southwestern adobe style facade and an ‘Early-California’ landscape theme.  The Lightfoot Planning Group teamed with the project architect to develop circulation walkways, plazas, planters and classroom courtyards that highlight the native landscape and character of the local foothills.

As designers of the exterior classroom environment, we took advantage of site conditions to bring the shapes of distant land-forms into pedestrian scale and integrate the campus into the hilly rocky landscape.  A significant amount of native rock was preserved to place car-sized signature boulder groupings into hillsides and changes of elevation and used for small river cobble bands to border pedestrian walks and gathering areas that occur throughout the site.

project highlights

• native grasses and plantings
• thematic plantings for each academic village
• reuse of site rock and boulders
• native and adaptive landscape
• computer controlled central irrigation