Project Overview
Boston Arts Academy New High School, Boston, Massachusetts
Located across from Fenway Park, the new 135,476 sf, five-story Boston Arts Academy is a premier school for artistic and academic innovation. The new school for 500 high-school students features a 500-seat theater, a black box theater, four dance studios, ten instrument practice rooms, a rooftop recital hall with a terrace, and a gymnasium. Syska Hennessy provided vertical transportation services for this new building, including the design of two machine-room-less elevators, which provided not only energy efficiency but full access to the upper landings of the school. The project also features a monumental stairway with handicap accessibility.
The building also includes an orchestra pit platform lift to provide handicap accessibility to the stage area. A challenging requirement for this lift is that it needed to provide specialized access to the stage while also providing a safe walking platform on top.
Syska Hennessy’s vertical transportation design team provided creative solutions to meet this challenge, allowing not only access to the stage, but also providing safe walking space by incorporating a fold-down top platform that served as a walkway once the lift had descended and was in a closed position.
Due to the specialized nature of the lift, a variance was required. Syska provided background information for the successful variance filing, which led to the variance being granted.
