Sidwell Friends: Building green for over a century. 

It should come as no surprise that the new Upper School renovation plans are making green building standards fundamental to the design. After all, green standards were at the center of all of Sidwell Friends’ recent renovations: the Middle School building in 2006, the Lower School gym and Groome addition in 2007, the David P. Pearson ’52 Athletic Center in 2010, and the Quaker Meeting House and Arts Center in 2011. And though many may consider sustainable architecture a recent trend, it turns out that using reclaimed building materials goes back to the School’s first decades.

At the turn of the 20th century, Thomas Sidwell’s School was outgrowing its space in the Eye Street Friends Meeting House. Fortunately, the lot immediately to the east of the building came up for sale, and Sidwell purchased it with dreams of a campus expansion. In 1904, Sidwell heard of an old Capitol Hill brick house that was being torn down to make room for the Cannon House Office Building. Not one to be wasteful, Sidwell had the bricks from the dismantled house trucked over to Eye Street. He did the same with bricks from an old Riggs Bank building that was also getting demolished. And that’s how he constructed the School’s first dedicated classroom building—and also, but not quite by design, the School’s first green building. 

The new building at 1809 Eye Street NW housed classrooms, a cafeteria, and a study hall. A porch off of the study hall faced Eye Street and was a great place for people-watching. Sidwell’s niece, Frances Sidwell Benson ’15, recalled that one of the most interesting regular sightings was President Woodrow Wilson taking his morning walk down Eye Street. Thomas Sidwell took note of the president, too. In 1919, Wilson had temporary wood bleachers constructed to watch the troops returning home from Europe after World War I. Thomas Sidwell—exhibiting Quaker thrift once again—purchased the wood and used it to build a structure on land he had recently bought from the Washington School for Boys on Wisconsin Avenue. Over time, this building grew into the main classrooms for the primary grades. Sidwell cheekily named it the Woodrow Wilson Building. It lasted for decades before being torn down in 1962. That’s also when the School purchased the Edgemoor Lane property. 

These early forays into green construction continued after Sidwell’s death. At the end of World War II, the student population grew dramatically and space was in short supply. The School purchased a steel Quonset hut that was military surplus. Beginning in 1946, this structure served as the main library for many years. Less than 10 years later, Sidwell Friends School continued its green streak with a transformative purchase: an old stone farmhouse that served as the family residence of an Army officer, the personal physician to Woodrow Wilson, and a CIA director. Today, we call it Zartman House. 

In 2004, that old stone house became the first of several intentionally green buildings when the School retrofitted it with an energy-efficient geothermal heat pump. Two years later, when the old 1950 brick Middle School building needed attention, rather than raze it and generate construction waste, the School renovated and expanded it, turning it into the first K-12 school building in the world to achieve the highest LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Since then, the School has won another LEED Platinum rating for taking the old 1958 Kenworthy Gymnasium and converting it into the Robert L. Smith Meeting Room and arts center. Two LEED Gold projects—the Lower School gym/Groome addition and the David P. Pearson ’52 Athletic Center—cemented the School’s commitment to sustainable architecture.

So the next time you’re gazing up at the exterior of the Bruce Stewart and Andra Jurist Middle School building covered in reclaimed wine casks or at the walls and floor of the Robert L. Smith Meeting Room constructed from derelict barns in Maryland, give a nod to our founder, Thomas Sidwell, who knew how to make the old new again.