Almost one hundred years after the Italian physician Maria Montessori developed her educational technique, her method remains controversial. But even the most rabid Montessori detractor should agree that the new Rogers Park Montessori School is a great addition to the city.
RPMS isn’t actually in Rogers Park anymore; it moved from two locations in that North Side neighborhood to its new home on a long, narrow site beside the Metra tracks in Bowmanville early in 2006.
You might call the new building, designed by Chicago architecture firm OWP/P, Miesian, because it does so much with so little. It’s a long, simple rectangle, but the way it uses color and geometry is kind of brilliant: the various slabs of pre-cast concrete that make up the facade are tinted several shades of red and green and composed in such a way that the whole building becomes a large-scale sculptural object.
On a similar tangent of doing more with less, according to RPMS Director of Development Kelly Hague, the budget for the project was $10 million [financed through a combination of capital contributions and a privately backed bond issue]. This sounds like a lot of money until you do the math and realize this produced a 48,000 square foot institutional building: consider the fact that residential new construction runs $300 per square foot and up (way up). And it’s even more amazing to discover that they broke ground for the place in December 2004 and completed construction in October 2005.
Right now about 170 students in grades pre-K through 7 [the school will run through 8th grade next year] attend; Hague says they’re shooting for a maximum capacity of 350.