Tree-lined roads wind through the ring of hills that surrounds the borough of Pennsburg, in eastern Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County. Hand-painted signs for farmstands selling fresh-picked rhubarb and sweet corn dot the landscape, as do stone houses and bank barns, links to the not-so-distant centuries during which agriculture was an even larger part of life in this part of the state. The main drag along Pike Street features a DQ and a brew pub called Simple Days. Taken together, these impressions add up to a quaint picture of this small pocket of the Upper Perkiomen Valley. So it’s rather unexpected—if not truly surprising—to find amidst the gentle folds of the topography a school that educates students from as many as 34 countries around the world. 

 The Perkiomen School, an independent college preparatory institution, admits students in grades six through twelve. Some students board, living in on-campus dormitories, and others stay just for the day—but the atmosphere is exceedingly convivial, and socializing frequently happens across boarder-commuter lines. But while the former could easily retreat to their dorm rooms during breaks, between classes, or after the end of the school day, the rest of the students didn’t have such a straightforward place for hanging out outside of class. In the mind of Perkiomen’s exceptionally visionary head of school, the idea began to form for a new building, one that would not only rearrange students’ relationships to each other and their campus but reorganize the spatial relationships within the campus itself.