The Oxford Academy provides a unique and specialized learning environment. It is a private school for boys that instructs in the "Socratic method", in which the class size is limited to one student and one teacher. The school has had great success in reversing trends toward academic failure, and through individualized attention creates confident and capable students.

At the start of Smith Edwards Architects' collaboration with the school,
The Oxford Academy campus consisted of four undistinguished academic/residential buildings that bordered an old service road. The school was in need of additional classroom space, an arts studio, science labs, and a new Learning Center that would incorporate a computer room and media center. The solution was a renovation and expansion of Knight Hall, which would not only accommodate the building program, but would also define one side of a new campus quadrangle. We proposed the elimination of the service road and overhead electrical service, and designed new landscaping, lighting, and walkway improvements to further strengthen the new student-oriented quadrangle.

The services that Smith Edwards Architects has provided for the school has run the full gamut from master planning, fund-raising graphics and text, to construction documents for the first two phases of construction.   The project was phased to meet the school's academic calendar and fundraising schedules.

Knight Hall Renovation and Expansion
Westbrook, Connecticut
The Oxford Academy
Completion Summer 1999