Little Tiger News

Outside Little Tiger Chinese Immersion School, kindergarteners form a line in front of a newly-installed outdoor sink, each of them sporting face masks and plastic shields. Taking turns, they step onto a small yellow stool, wash their hands for a supervised 20 seconds and leap down in a mad dash toward the playground. It is recess time, but for kindergarten teacher Yuxia Liu, this is no break. While her students play, she is disinfecting her new outdoor classroom.

The new 735-sf structure, tucked inconspicuously behind the renovated Hyde Park bungalow, is a play on the historic American one-room schoolhouse: a gable form, rectangular in plan, with a single classroom space and a vertically protruding clerestory. The design’s low eaves make the building feel more approachable to its primary inhabitants — children under four feet tall. “The thing that was surprising for me was how that little twist made building something so familiar feel very unfamiliar and new” says Murray Legge, FAIA.