Lakeside announces a significant renovation of Allen-Gates Hall!

Mar 16 2026

by Amanda Darling, director of communications

Above: An artistic rendering of the high-bay engineering lab and classroom that will be part of the renovation.

Lakeside School is excited to share our plans for a fully renovated ground floor in Allen-Gates Hall, including new engineering and design labs and fabrication spaces, a robotics lab, expanded community space, and renovated humanities classrooms.

The project was made possible by the construction of the T.J. Vassar ’68 Center for the Sciences and Humanities: Starting this spring, all biology, physics, and chemistry classes will begin moving from Allen-Gates Hall into the Vassar Center. The space in Allen-Gates vacated by those classes will be redesigned as interdisciplinary learning environments that unleash student and faculty creativity and advance Lakeside’s curriculum.

“The renovation directly relates to our strategic plan’s prioritization of educational excellence: specifically, our desire to design experiential and immersive learning experiences that center students’ agency and creativity,” says Academic Dean Hans de Grys. “With this new space, we will be able to unlock curricular opportunities across all of our disciplines, and students will be increasingly able to do hands-on learning in a wider variety of classrooms.”

“Lakeside makes sure our students are familiar with and prepared for the technological advances they experience in the world around them; and, as educators, we are ever more conscious of the need for them to explore designing, creating, problem-solving, and building,” shares Interim Head of School/Upper School Director Ryan Boccuzzi.

Adding engineering and design labs will enable the school to offer new engineering classes and expand our physics curriculum. While the Vassar Center has two specially designed physics classrooms and labs, these new fabrication labs and classrooms in Allen-Gates will contain specialized equipment that allows students to work on advanced projects.

“The remodeled engineering and advanced physics spaces will expand access to advanced prototyping and fabrication tools and dramatically increase what our students can envision and create,” explains physics teacher Ava Erickson, who served on the project’s working group. “These environments will empower students to design, build, and test real solutions, and to see themselves as engineers who can make a difference.”

In addition to the engineering and design labs, the new robotics lab will be the first purposefully designed space for Lakeside's robotics teams to build, program, and test their robots in preparation for competitions.

The fabrication and design labs will be deliberately interdisciplinary: “We want these new facilities to be used across multiple departments and disciplines,” emphasizes Boccuzzi. “While there are natural connections for science and engineering classes, we are perhaps most excited for the unexpected connections that art, humanities, and other disciplines and clubs will find. A space where students can design and build solutions to novel and complex problems is necessary as we prepare our students for challenges they may face in the world.”

The renovation will begin in mid-June 2026, after the end of this school year. Most of the disruptive work will be completed over the summer. The top floor of Allen-Gates will be in use during the 2026-2027 school year. The renovation is expected to be complete by spring 2027, with the space fully open for use in fall 2027.

Here’s what students and educators have to look forward to:

The central core of Allen-Gates will be renovated, expanded, and re-envisioned as a community space with soft seating, more types of spaces for collaboration, and faculty workdesks. The core will expand to encompass what is currently the lobby on the east side of the building. You will be happy to know that the fishtank will stay in the building!
Kent Evans Auditorium will transition into Kent Evans Lab: a large-scale, high-ceilinged, high-bay engineering lab and classroom designed for testing, assembling, and analyzing heavy, oversized structural components and machinery. This space will function as a classroom, with worktables and a full AV setup, and be available for out-of-class experimentation and invention. Events that were formerly held in Kent Evans Auditorium will relocate to other spaces on campus, including community spaces in the Vassar Center.
The large fabrication lab will be a “dusty and dirty” space, where trained students will be able to work with wood and metal. It will include heavy machinery like drills, a bandsaw, a CNC router, and an industrial dust collector.
Next door, a small fabrication lab will be a clean room, where students will work with 3D printers, a laser cutter, and other electronics.
A new engineering classroom will be a more traditional teaching space, with reconfigurable tables, AV and whiteboards, as well as soldering stations for projects involving electrical circuits and engineering.
The robotics lab will have a 12’x12’ field, worktables, storage for parts, and tools. This will be a permanent space for Lakeside’s two robotics teams (which include students in grades 9-12) to build, test, and practice with their robots. For the last several years, the teams have been using the basement of the PGA building, a hard-to-access space with no visibility to the larger community. Lakeside robotics team members regularly compete in the robotics State Championships, and a Lakeside team has twice competed in the World Championships.
The three classrooms on the north side of the building will be renovated and receive new carpets, new desks and chairs, and upgraded AV and whiteboards. They will primarily serve as humanities classrooms for history and language classes currently located in Bliss Hall. These new classrooms will be more than double the size of the current spaces in Bliss.
The two bathrooms on the ground floor will be lightly renovated.
A new enclosed entryway on the east side of the building will increase energy savings and promote smooth traffic flow.

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is that Lakeside will be hiring a new faculty member who will teach classes, manage the engineering and design spaces, and train students and adults on how to safely use the tools during supervised open hours. They will also make decisions about the physical set-up and tools of the lab spaces, and partner with all of our faculty to help design curriculum and projects that use the new spaces.

A working group of faculty and administrators worked with LMN Architects, as well as an engineering lab consultant, to design the space. BNBuilders will be managing the construction. In preparation for the project, the working group visited other schools with robust fabrication spaces, including Silicon Valley schools Lick-Wilmerding High School, Menlo School, and The Nueva School, as well as some peer schools closer to home. “Our teachers and students are super creative, but we didn’t have space for them to act on all of their ideas,” said de Grys. An example of this is that “our students taking engineering have been making skateboards; at Menlo, they are making an electric car.” With our new studios and labs, de Grys said, Lakeside students will be able to construct projects similar in ambition to what they are able to accomplish in our art studios. “I’m excited about how it will unlock students’ creativity and passion and ability to invent.”

Lakeside’s campus master plan, completed in 2025 as part of the school’s strategic plan, laid the groundwork for this renovation. Our strategic plan, Hope in Action, combined with the master plan, serves as a framework for future campus development, allowing Lakeside to advance initiatives as funding and circumstances permit.

If you would like to learn more about how to support this project and Lakeside student and faculty work in engineering and robotics — or other projects that have been identified as priorities in the strategic and master plans — contact Director of Institutional Philanthropy Christine Lessard at 206-440-2724 or info@lakesideschool.site.

Scroll through the images below and stay tuned for more information!