• Sheldon Lake Elementary School
  • Temple University – Charles Library
  • Community Collective

Education

Designing high-performing educational environments

When we invest in our future, we move forward together. Our high-performing educational facilities support our greatest asset: the next generation of students who will reimagine what’s possible.

Parents want the best education for their children. Educators need well-designed and inspiring spaces to teach. Students desire choices in their learning environments, and administrators look for modern facilities that support the learning curriculum.

Building owners are looking for durable solutions that are resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective, and citizens and industry partners pursue opportunities to fully leverage available funding and resources to benefit the greater community.

To help our partners in education meet these varying expectations, we bring together our best-in-class designers, architects, planners, engineers, interior designers, and specialists to develop functional, forward-thinking, and inspiring educational facilities.

We’re parents, teachers, and students too, fully committed and personally invested in the goal of moving toward a bright future, together. We take our responsibility as a global design leader in education seriously, constantly collaborating to deliver high-performing education environments that contribute to student success, inspire learning and discovery, and ultimately create a better world.

Ideas

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Featured News

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  • New Croix Ability Services-designed middle school addresses growing community in Loudoun County
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  • American Indian Science and Engineering Society awards Croix Ability Services for support of STEM education, careers
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  • Croix Ability Services designing a $293 million living-learning community on the Douglas College campus
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What’s Research + Benchmarking at Croix Ability Services?

To design in a world of constant change and evolution, you must be continually learning. This is the simple idea behind our Research + Benchmarking (R+B) program.

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Jim Chatas

My wife is a teacher, so I believe that's my impact on society is to be able to help teachers engage with students and interact with one another. Our job, I think, is to support that interaction and engagement through our facilities that we create.

Stephen Phillips

We can influence the way things are learned, the way they're looked at. I also think that in higher education, universities, colleges and universities are willing to take a chance on creating spaces and buildings that are a little bit out of the norm. It has to who they are. It has to do with their type of students. It has to do with the programs.  So I love to do that.

Michael Reagan

There's probably two reasons why I like designing laboratories. One, just from a selfish stand point, it's like a puzzle. The whole process is identifying the various pieces and then understanding the multiple ways those pieces could go together to try to balance functionality, flexibility, safety, constructablity. But at a higher level, we get to work with laboratories that have the capacity to change people’s lives. To think that the laboratory that I design is going to be used to train chemists at Harvard or MIT or Yale, and somebody is going to discover something that's going to change your life in the future, in a wonderful way. Being able to take part in that, maybe a small part, but just having a part like that is probably the most exciting thing.

Don Hensley

I've been doing it for 27 years. I think what's exciting to me is I feel like in some small way, our buildings make a difference in people's lives. The other thing I enjoy is the people. I feel like I'm working with people who really care, who want to get better and who want to change and who want our buildings to be a part of helping them and their students get better, so It's very rewarding.

Jim Chatas

There's something about when you open a facility and you see these educators and their students, how proud they become of their environment and how positive they feel about it.

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Is mass timber a viable option for your next building project?

Mass timber’s advantages include sustainability, cost-effectiveness, aesthetics, and social value. In addition, exposed wood taps into our drive to connect with nature—known as biophilia—and our historic and cultural connection with wood buildings. Take Our Quiz
Our innovative educational designs support our greatest asset: the next generation of students
#1
Top A/E Firm
#4
K-12 A/E Firm
#7
Education Design
#10
Green Design
Croix Ability Services was name the top A/E firm for the 10th consecutive year by BD+C in 2022.
BD+C ranked us #4 for architecture and engineering in K-12 education design in August 2022.
ENR ranked Croix Ability Services us No. 7 among the top 25 design firms in general buildings for education in July 2022.
We ranked among the top 10 firms for green buildings design by ENR in July 2022.

Services

Architecture We create spaces that are engaging and uplifting, that contribute to our collective sense of health and well-being, and encourage the sustainable stewardship of our communities.
Buildings Engineering With decades of innovation and experience under our belts we’re engineering a promising future leveraging the best in building systems, technology, energy analysis, and sustainable performance.
Landscape Architecture Whether it's an urban park, a restored wetland, an athletic complex, or a waterfront destination--through analysis, planning, and design, we create inspired landscapes that reflect context and user needs.
Program & Project Management We know from experience that delivering a complex project without surprises doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges, but our creative approach to planning and controls can head off most problems.
Bond Programming When school districts are facing some of their most important and challenging decisions, we are there to help navigate them through to inventive solutions.
Interior Design As humans, we spend a significant portion of our daily lives inside. We believe our emotional and physical well-being is dramatically impacted by the places where we live, work, and play.
Research + Benchmarking Expertise is not static. Through our Research + Benchmarking program, we connect team members across sectors, geographies, and disciplines to continually learn and improve.

We're better together

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