Boys Town School

Since its opening in 1948, Boys Town High School has continually provided safe and inspiring learning experiences for its students. Aging facilities, plans for expansion, and the need to consolidate grade levels prompted the organization to enlist DLR Group to help make plans for an upgrade.

The design for the new Boys Town Education Center captures the spirit of Boys Town and appreciation of the little things. Throughout the design process, special attention was paid to each detail; from the vertical and horizontal juxtaposition of form to brick and stone color detailing. Capturing the spirit of place – celebrating it – was the ultimate goal of the project. At the beginning of the design process, students and staff shared their desire for more privacy on the campus. The design team ensured that there is a distinct separation between public and private spaces. The exterior façade was inspired by historic facilities of Boys Town, with its playful brick patterns and original precast concrete mural.

The project is comprised of over 700 pieces of precast concrete components including 56,000SF of CarbonCast High Performance Insulated Wall Panels. Another 284 pieces of stoneclad coping lined the top of the concrete walls. In addition to the wall panels and coping, the project included precast hollow core plank and double tees to create a storm shelter area. The highly energy efficient CarbonCast wall panels were clad with a five-color blend of thin brick as well as 2” green granite to blend with the existing Boys Town Campus aesthetic. There are thirteen prominent mosaic brick panels along the main campus drive. They incorporated every size of thin brick available from Endicott Brick and organized into 3 custom 4’x4’ mold patterns. Each mold pattern was repeated multiple times within the panel, but each with a varying orientation horizontally and vertically to create the one of kind appearance for each of the 13 mosaic panels.

The project’s design included state of the art concrete technology in its 16 by 30-foot concrete wall celebrating Boys Town’s history to welcome students and visitors to the facility. This Graphic Concrete technology is unique to the precast industry.