The H&H team recently completed work at the Cedarwood Waldorf School in SW Portland. The project included expanding and remodeling a classroom, relocating a bathroom, remodeling a kitchenette, and expanding classroom doorways to be ADA compliant. One part of expanding the doorways included altering the freshly painted art glass transom windows to fit the new width.
H&H carpenters Josh Tinker and Jason Woods modified the original transom windows by building frames around them in order to fit them inside the new width of the doorway. They then installed the windows above the new doors in such a way that the reveals around the perimeter match those of the adjacent finished door. The result is a doorway that meets both ADA requirements and the aesthetic history of the school.
As you may notice in the photo above, the transom window on the left features a Celtic knot design while the one on the right is clear – but probably not for long! Cedarwood parent Carrie Bacigalupi came up with the idea to paint the transom windows when her child was in second grade. Many of the windows had been painted over in white (to disappear into the walls) or just left clear. Carrie thought it would be a nice holiday gift to her child’s teacher to spruce them up.
“We were trying to come up with creative ideas to appreciate our teacher that time of year,” Carrie said. “So we thought it was a good legacy to leave in our teacher’s name if we turned all these transoms into stained glass.”
At Cedarwood the students keep the same teacher every year, so it became tradition for the class’s parents to pool their money together to have the transom windows above each new classroom turned into stained glass. So far they have had four windows painted, each window’s design representing a theme of that year’s class. “We took it to the teacher so she knew it would be coming and asked her what theme or design she wanted to build it around,” Carrie explained.
Once the designs were selected, the parents brought the windows to local glass artist David Schlicker to turn the plain transom windows into works of art.
This window hangs above the fourth grade classroom and was the third gifted window. The Celtic knot design ties in with the 4th grade’s focus on Norse and Celtic mythology. This photo shows the window newly installed by H&H into the widened doorway.
This window is above the 5th grade’s classroom door and is the most recent gifted window. The design represents geometry, an important topic of the fifth year’s coursework.
“They look pretty, but it means something much more special if you were in the class and know the meaning of the piece,” said Carrie. “These windows will be the teacher’s legacy in the building.”
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