Michelle Salyer:                Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH, where we discuss the most innovative, interesting, and outside-the-box solutions to some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the world of architecture, engineering, design, construction, and mission solutions. You’ll hear directly from the problem solvers at BRPH as we dive deep into the latest news, trends, and topics in aerospace, defense, manufacturing and industrial, commercial, education, entertainment and hospitality. I’m your host, Michelle Salyer, and I’ll be your guide as we open the lid on these topics and more, and invite you for an insider’s look at one of the most successful, fastest-growing, employee-owned AEC firms in the United States.

Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH. The Southeast U.S. is experiencing its fastest growth in decades. Although it’s an ideal haven for retirees, the growth of aerospace, tourism, healthcare, real estate, and other key industries have all contributed to an influx of families with school-aged children. Many Fortune 500 companies are relocating or establishing regional headquarters in the Southeast. Not only that, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked additional migration to the southern states with almost 25% of those who relocated within the United States, moving to Florida alone, significantly more than any other state in the U.S.

With that migration throughout the south comes the need for new and updated schools, straining already-lean district budgets. What’s the solution? Prototype schools are one answer. Cris Vigil, Senior VP for BRPH, has worked in the education market for more than 30 years and played a key role in providing school districts with fast, economical, and flexible, yet customized school designs in the form of prototype schools. Welcome to the show, Cris.

Cris Vigil:                            Great. Thank you for inviting me.

Michelle Salyer:                I’m glad you’re here. Now, you’ve worn many hats at BRPH over the years, but give me a little background on your education and work specifically.

Cris Vigil:                            My experience actually started before I came to BRPH. I worked for another company which had a couple of the very early prototypes in Miami-Dade County. I did a couple of those before I came to BRPH, and then it took off from there. I’ve enjoyed working on the education market for the entirety of my career, and I was very much a big part of a lot of changes in the educational world, in the technology world, in the impacts for hurricane and hardening and resiliency in schools. So, around the 1990s, I had decided I would write an article related to the influx of computers and to the school system. It’s hard to believe, but there was a time we didn’t have any computers in schools.

Michelle Salyer:                Yes, I remember that.

Cris Vigil:                            The national publication picked up my article and decided to publish it and put me on the cover of the Consulting-Specifying Engineering Magazine in 1996.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow.

Cris Vigil:                            That gave us and myself a lot of national recognition. Our company has continued that recognition across the Southeast United States with doing some of the most prolific and greatest schools of our nation, so we’re very proud of it.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow. Wow. That’s impressive. Before we get too deep into this topic, explain what the term prototype means in relation to a school design.

Cris Vigil:                            Well, that’s a good question. This is my opinion now, the prototype system works. A prototype has various different ways you can work it based on whether you’re in the elementary, middle, or high school levels, and it also applies to the K-eight schools in another different fashion. But the elementary school is really a prototype where the core facilities are intentionally meant to be consistent. So, you’d have a standard administration, standard media center, standard cafeteria and kitchen support, and then the classrooms really flex in size as the student population of that region or that county or that space grows and shrinks.

In the middle school and the high school, that becomes far more complex. So, you end up with other spaces where this change in population affects the core a whole lot more. Middle schools, and of course, even to graduate in the high schools, there’s more involved in other special functions of the school.

Michelle Salyer:                What do you mean by that?

Cris Vigil:                            Such like vocational education programs or specialties programs that are specific inductions by those districts. So, from that, you end up with a kit of parts. You end up with a grouping of different functions that maybe one prototype doesn’t need, and then the next prototype does. So, you can pull those parts off and have prototypical solutions that you can put together at those middle and high school levels. At the elementary school, it’s a lot more, as I just said, a little bit more compacted and a little bit more functional to try and keep a core space that’s the same and flex the classroom sizes.

Michelle Salyer:                So the idea here being that it is quicker and more cost-efficient to start with a prototype versus designing and engineering a school from scratch every time.

Cris Vigil:                            Absolutely. It’s not just in the function of design and construction. It’s in the administration and operations of the school. So, the institution would define those student populations based on the administration and operation of the school. So, that would help them figure out whether it’s one principal or one assistant principal or the grouping of janitorial staff or administrative staff to support the actual school function. So, once they do that, they pretty much define what the size of the school will be, and then the prototype is designed to meet that.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, got you. A lot of people know that BRPH was founded primarily to serve the aerospace industry, but they don’t always realize that the firm has actually been designing schools for nearly as long since the 1970s. So, from what I understand, that came to be from the need to build schools to support the space program here in Melbourne along the Space Coast. Is that correct?

Cris Vigil:                            Well, that’s correct for the early years, but it changed pretty quickly. The population boomed in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. So, we here at BRPH opened an office in Tallahassee because that was close to the Department of Education. At that time, the Department of Education really funded all school construction in the State of Florida, and that spurred the intent that we’d have to have ourselves close to the decision makers.

Michelle Salyer:                Oh, okay.

Cris Vigil:                            So that’s what we did. Quickly off the bat, the State of Florida came up with a need to create a prototypical solution that would match a student station size, a student station costs, and a square footage cost that they would fund from the State Department to the districts. So, we created our first prototype. It’s what I call the six-finger school. It’s six individual buildings in a row, and we have one building that’s an administration building, one building that’s the cafeteria building, and the other four buildings are all classroom buildings. It was really a prolific success. We did over 50 uses of that prototype.

Michelle Salyer:                Throughout the state.

Cris Vigil:                            Throughout the State of Florida, and so the state actually allowed other architects to come up with a similar school design. So, there are several other versions of that same design through the mid-1980s to late 1980s. So, that design probably has more than 75 to 80 uses throughout the state.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow, interesting. Okay. Learned something there. I feel like one might say that a prototype school is maybe too cookie cutter or too generic and assume that a prototype couldn’t necessarily meet their unique needs. So, what would you say to that?

Cris Vigil:                            Yeah, I would say that’s not true. There’s a lot that goes into how the education is taught in a school, and to be perfectly blunt, we’ve done so many prototypes that were very similar, and then we’ve walked back into the school and we’ve seen the education being delivered completely different. That’s a neat function because that means you’re doing the school correctly. When you’re designing it correctly, you’ve got a flexibility that different educational styles can be used in different ways.

We’ve seen schools being used as a conventional educational teaching methods, and then we’ve seen them in more group settings and resource settings, and then we’ve seen them used as a Montessori. That’s all based on the same prototype and the same design. So, I think that prototype schools, when designed correctly, have the flexibility that the educators can use in any which way they want.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. What about differences in the site itself or the land that the school needs to be built upon? Do prototypes allow for that flexibility as well?

Cris Vigil:                            Oh, that’s the tough question, right? Because there is no site that’s ever the same. Everybody knows that’s in the school district markets. Whether you’re in Florida or Georgia or South Carolina, all those places that we work in, they are all different. There’s different geotechnical requirements. There’s different surveying requirements in soils, conditions, issues, and so they’re never the same. So, every prototype has to have that flexibility that it can be placed in another location and not be significantly revised.

Michelle Salyer:                Just move a building here or there.

Cris Vigil:                            Yeah, so you’ve got to find a way to try and have flexibility in the design to be able to shift and fit within that site.

Michelle Salyer:                If the idea is efficiency and cost savings, give me a ballpark for how much money you can save, but also how much time you might be able to save using a prototype design versus starting from scratch.

Cris Vigil:                            That’s the key question. Everybody wants something customized to their community. That’s generally what their community is always looking for, and that’s a good thing to ask for. But on the school district side, they’re always on a tight time crunch. They’re always in a tight budget. So, cost savings ideas are always prevalent, even though we want to all of our schools to meet the needs of the community. Frankly, it was crazy in the 2000s when we were punching out prototype schools, like newspapers coming off of newspaper press. There was a time we were doing one school a month for years, and that really set a table for us to understand how quickly could we get it out. Elementary schools were typically out from design to construction in 12 months.

The middle schools were through design to construction at 18 months, and the high schools, 24 months or more. Things have changed over the years. There’s a lot more in our schools than they used to be. So, things have expanded those deadline dates and those times, but we still try and contract our schedules and we try and work our points to design those facets to the community and still meet those kinds of standards that we’ve set from 20, 30 years ago.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. What are some of the changes that you’ve seen in school design throughout your career, and especially what’s come about lately?

Cris Vigil:                            That’s an interesting point because it’s one of those things that we see changes in the school design, consistent. There’s always change. There’s never a case where things work well and then they work always well. There’s always a change that helps to make them improve. Back in the 1990s, there was a lot of influence from the educators to try and create a pod concept, which allowed for more than one teacher to be introduced into a classroom at the elementary school level. So, you would have perhaps two or four classrooms working together with those teachers, and the kids would move between the classrooms or they’d be open to the pod to be able to, the teachers, move between the classrooms. That was an interesting concept.

It was pretty radical, and it made a significant impact in all the designs of a prototype, including the engineering systems by far the biggest issue. Then the things changed. Technology changed a lot. With the introduction of technology and that the teachers had the ability to reach outside the classroom to introduce other technological tools, it worked itself into being more compact schools.

So, we ended up with less schools being designed with exterior corridors and more with double loaded interior corridors in the classrooms being separated from each other, instead of being in a pod concept where they would share between the classrooms. Interesting with that, it continued to grow throughout the late 1990s and 2000s as we did schools like the Lakeshore Middle School in Palm Beach County and the Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School in Palm Beach County, where we began to compact the schools more to gain more efficiencies and bring those interior courtyards into control.

Whereas we used to have courtyards that meandered through the school prototypes. Now they get them into control, or maybe the school didn’t have much of a courtyard at all and became a more secured space. So, it was more urban design that began to shape the schools and those designs. That drove down the cost per square foot, and it drove down the cost per student station.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Now, is that a function of an increased need for security or mainly just for efficiency?

Cris Vigil:                            It is. Yeah. That was one of the functions. I mean, it became efficient based on mechanical systems and cooling systems. There was a movement for energy efficiencies going on. Obviously, the educational piece I just mentioned was a big part of it. Then, yes, security. In the late 1990s and to early 2000s, we began to see some problems in schools across the nation for safety, and that was a reaction that forced us to create something in the industry, we called CPTED Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and that actually helped us define interior spaces and outdoor enclosed spaces to try and create more of a compact school environment in that design.

So, that’s what started to push us towards the things like the Boynton Beach High School prototype that we created where you had a very nice, beautiful interior courtyard and the elementary prototypes that came out of the Broward School Board in South Florida, which were very compact schools. Then we began to do similar functions in Georgia. Georgia had a lot of campuses and sprawling schools, which was very much the architectural motif of that area, but we started pulling those in and becoming more compact in the Georgia market as well.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. So, students are more safely confined in the inside of the campus versus meandering outside.

Cris Vigil:                            That’s correct. That’s correct. That’s right.

Michelle Salyer:                I guess I shouldn’t say confined. What are some other ways that schools can be designed more efficiently? Are there other tools that you’re using to help keep the design and engineering costs down, or conversely, are there other factors that are driving up costs these days?

Cris Vigil:                            Yeah. Well, elementary schools particularly were consistently one-story facilities. To try and make it more efficient, we began to go to two-story facilities. Today, elementary schools, it’s not uncommon now to find a three-story facility, which 20 years ago would’ve been unheard of. High schools used to be a two-story facility pretty consistently in the early years, but now it’s not uncommon. We’ve got high schools that are going three, four, five, six stories. That’s because they’re trying to get more efficient and more compact and try and pull those spaces in and get them more urbanized. We did starting doing that in some more remote, more rural school districts, like Sarasota School District in the State of Florida.

We began designing prototypes, very compact school with a two-story elementary function. So, the upper grades were in the upper floors. One of the interesting designs that we worked out then is I mentioned all those things about education and security and whatnot, but then we started to move into a movement of energy efficiency. So, we began designing our schools so that they had not just a singular building, which is singular face that would be subject to solar gain, but have multiple juxtapositions of the building. So, we could create angular movement in the upper floors and the lower floors. So, the sun never hit the school in the same spot twice.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Explain that to me a little bit more. I think you lost me there.

Cris Vigil:                            Well, we started working facilities in an L-shaped configuration or a V-shaped configuration or a U-shaped configuration. So, no system of classrooms never had the same face in the same direction. So, maybe a quarter of the school would have the sun in the morning, and another quarter of the school would have the sun in the midday, and then another quarter would have the direct sun in the afternoon. That helped break down the energy gains that were on the school and drive up efficiency and drive down energy costs.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, got you. Yeah, this is one of the times when I wish this was a visual podcast as well. So, we could just show diagrams here, but we’ll just have to envision that. It’s so funny talking about the increases in technology and how different classrooms are now than when you and I were in school, but it reminds me a few years ago, my son wanted to paint his room a dark green. We picked out the paint and we started painting, and I said, “Oh, it looks like a chalkboard.” He was like, “Wait, what?” I said, “A chalkboard in your classroom.” He was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We only have whiteboards in the classroom.”

It made me realize it was such a significant moment that, wow, they don’t have green chalkboards in classrooms anymore. There’s so much technology, whiteboards, that thing. So, tell me about technology on that note, and how has BRPH been able to keep up with the changing technology in schools, not only in the classrooms, but in terms of systems as well?

Cris Vigil:                            There’s a lot of research that’s done across the nation for the proper method for teaching, and it’s a great debate. It’s wonderful to actually listen to the educators argue in the ways that they want to teach to the kids differently across the nation. I’ve seen many different versions of it. One of the bigger functions that affected the nation was in the early 2000s, what was called the 21st Century School Learning. There are many different facets and variations behind it, but the one I remembered was a leading industry book that was written called Learning by Design. It broke down the basic learning for students into three functions. It was in large groups, there are standard classroom groups, and then individual learning.

Technology had a huge impact to that because technology forces our little ones to learn individually, and that can be very difficult for them to separate from the rest of the unification of learning. They need to be part of groups to learn within groups. Some teachers will tell you that some of the greatest educators are the other students in the room. So, the factors of touch screens and interactive marker boards and iPads and all sorts of other learning functions have to be part of the design. You’ve got to interact it.

So, the kids have the opportunity to learn individually, then they have to come back into their group setting, which is their classroom setting. And then they’ve got to find a different place to go where they get a larger group setting that might be in a media center, an outdoor learning center, or something like that. But those functions are really important to early growth learning.

Michelle Salyer:                Interesting. What about technology for various systems like the operations of the school?

Cris Vigil:                            Well, this is where a lot of districts want to do things differently. So, many districts will control the cost and impact of technology in the school on their own. So, we give them a design that obviously works with it, and then they introduce what they want. Some school districts I’ve seen do full video conferencing. It’s really fun to see the kids video conferencing with another kid in Africa. Yeah, it’s really neat. Then there’s other things where they want to do interactive touchscreens and work that within the classroom too. Those technologies are completely different in how we wire them, how we power them, and how we work them.

Going back to the story of my story that I wrote that was published, that was on the basis of the genesis of this set into technology in the educational market. Back then, we were looking at high harmonic impacts in the electrical systems because of computers being introduced into the schools. It forced us to create new electrical designs to be able to subjugate power that was delivered to the computer versus power that was delivered to the classroom. In today’s world, that’s irrelevant because we are so efficient with the technology power draw that we can reduce that at tremendous needs, but now we look for more things to be more efficient in the classroom, like LED lighting and daylighting and classroom lighting. So, that spurs us into looking for more efficiencies.

Michelle Salyer:                You bring up an important topic, which is environmental concerns and energy efficiency. So, are there other ways that schools are making the most of energy usage?

Cris Vigil:                            Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a great question. About 20 years ago, the USGBC LEED came out with some levels of energy efficiency and environmental uses.

Michelle Salyer:                Let me stop you there. For those who may not know what those acronyms are, can you explain that?

Cris Vigil:                            Sure. The USGBC stands for the United States Green Building Council and LEED stands for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. So, it makes sure that the LEED professional design systems and components in the building, which uses low energy and obviously very environmentally sustainable products. So, with that, we introduced that in all of our buildings. So, we use what’s now called a high performance building index, and some of our latest designs, which came out in Orange County in Florida, we did in Ocoee Elementary School.

Then that graduated into other schools of that prototype that got a little bit different in design, such as the Tomoka School, which is another school that we’re very proud of, and that’s in Volusia County. We’ve also designed another prototype school called the Dresden School in DeKalb County up in Georgia. All these are great high-performance schools. They’re outstanding energy efficiency and wonderful environmental uses of resources.

Michelle Salyer:                So that saves the district money in the long-term as well.

Cris Vigil:                            It does. Right. So, we’re getting back to the point of why a prototype. The prototype really helps the district meet those timing constraints, helps them meet their cost constraints, and then establishes low operating costs over the course of the life of the school.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Why is it do you think that education has been such a pivotal part of your career, and why is it so meaningful to you?

Cris Vigil:                            Well, I love the fact, and I’m very proud. I’ve been doing this for so long that I’ve seen actually the little ones go to school in a school I’ve designed and then eventually hired them out of college.

Michelle Salyer:                That’s happened?

Cris Vigil:                            It has happened, and it’s so much fun to see that go through facilities that I’ve been a part of. So, I know for a fact that the kids are learning those STEM programs. As you know, Michelle, we have a STEM program here at BRPH where we offer that incentivization to teachers for the great things they do, and that’s really important to us. We’re in this not because we’re trying to just simply design a building. We’re trying to help kids grow in their careers and their lives and set the stage for their future.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Training that next generation of architects and engineers and constructors.

Cris Vigil:                            That’s right. I can add that in on a personal note, my mother was a teacher for 30+ years, and so still to this day, she likes to teach and she still brings kids in well after she’s retired 20 years ago, still loves to teach. So, she instilled in me that desire to spend my career helping to train and teach and be a part of that with kids in their education too. So, I’ve certainly enjoyed the fact that my career has helped see that to fruition.

Michelle Salyer:                So we’re creating lifelong learners, as they say.

Cris Vigil:                            Lifelong learners.

Michelle Salyer:                Right. Well, thank you so much, Cris. As always, you are a wealth of knowledge, so I appreciate you coming back to the show.

Cris Vigil:                            Thank you.

Michelle Salyer:                Thanks for joining us today for Outside the Box with BRPH. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode as we explored some of the most innovative and challenging projects and the most pressing issues and trends in the AEC world. Learn more about us at brph.com. Email us at [email protected] and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X. You’ll find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when new episodes are posted. See you next time on Outside the Box with BRPH.