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TEF Design Reveals Design of New Schools of the Sacred Heart Student Wellness Center

The 66,000-square-foot, four-story urban infill building integrates wellness into daily student life while expanding athletic, physical education, and gathering spaces for the school community

Schools of the Sacred Heart Student Wellness Center exterior rendering — TEF Design

The Wellness, Athletic, and Aquatics Center for the K–12 Schools of the Sacred Heart is conceived as a place where movement, reflection, and community come together in support of the education of the whole child—mind, body, and spirit. The 66,000-square-foot, four-story urban infill building integrates wellness into daily student life while expanding athletic, physical education, and gathering spaces for the school community.

The building is organized around three primary program zones—natatorium, gymnasium, and training spaces—expressed as horizontal layers that give the façade a sense of rhythm and motion. Solid and transparent elements shift across these bands, creating a measured variation that reflects growth, change, and different modes of activity. The composition balances structure and openness, allowing the building to feel both grounded and dynamic along the Geary corridor.

Transparency plays a key role in connecting the life of the school to the city. A central glazed band reveals moments of shared activity and reinforces the role of wellness as a collective experience, while quieter, more enclosed areas support focus and recovery. Throughout the project, moments of compression and release, light and shadow, movement and stillness are used to create an environment that supports both physical exertion and mental clarity.

Programmatically, the center brings together a partially below-grade natatorium for training, competition swimming, and water polo; a gymnasium seating more than 500; a rooftop turf field; and flexible instructional spaces for fitness, nutrition, and wellness education. Targeting LEED Gold, the building also provides spaces that accommodate large assemblies as well as informal gatherings, strengthening connections across the student body and broader school community.