A new middle school for Malden Catholic, delivered without increasing the initial build’s footprint.
Most academic leaders don’t need to be convinced that a new building should do more than solve one problem. Boards and families already expect it and budgets are tight enough that no one wants to fund a project with a narrow return. The part that’s genuinely hard isn’t knowing a project should advance enrollment, academics, extracurricular offerings and operations all at once. It’s figuring out how to actually build that project.
That’s where we spend most of our time with academic clients: not convincing them expansion needs to work harder, but helping them translate that ambition into a scope, a budget and a design that can carry it. Our project with Malden Catholic is a clear example of what that looks like in practice.
Malden Catholic: One Project, Several Institutional Priorities
With Malden Catholic, what started as a scope for a turf field and indoor practice gym evolved into a single facility that expanded the school’s academic, athletic and wellness space all at once, without pushing further into a tightly constrained campus. This was made possible by early exploration and collaboration with our design-build team to understand and analyze overall goals to maximize the space and design.
Hear from Sean Hurley, VP of Advancement & CFO, Malden Catholic; Keri DiLeo, VP & Partner, Scalora Consulting Group; and our own Kevin Kozak, VP of Design & Lead Architect, on how the project came together.
“It was a team effort to get to the solution. The school knew what it needed but maybe not exactly how to get there. They were clear on their expectations of program, space and durability and that allowed the Timberline design team to meet the intent within the budget.” – Keri DiLeo, Scalora Consulting Group
It’s a project that reflects a simple principle: solving multiple institutional challenges at once takes a creative solution, not just a broader scope. Because Malden Catholic’s intent was clear from the start, the design team had the room to find a more inventive path forward to include the middle school, and the project team held to that plan closely to deliver it on budget and on schedule.
Building for More Than One Answer
As Malden Catholic demonstrates, the key to success starts with bringing design and construction expertise into the conversation early, before the scope is locked and the parameters are already set. That early collaboration allows an institution’s full list of priorities to shape the building, rather than getting bolted on after the fact It’s also where budget and schedule alignment happens in real time, so tradeoffs are understood before they become expensive change orders. From there, our teams focus on footprint optimization: finding the ways a constrained site can do more, whether that means reconsidering a building’s height, its adjacencies, or how spaces can be designed to serve more than one purpose across the day.
The Takeaway
If your institution needs to expand, the project shouldn’t be scoped around a single need. It should be scoped around all of them. The more institutional priorities a project can credibly advance, the stronger the case for building becomes, and the more protected that investment is as circumstances change.
Getting there starts before design begins, with the right partner asking the right questions early. That’s the value we bring to every academic client: helping schools build not just what they need today, but a facility that continues to serve their mission for years to come.
This article is part of our Academic Insight Series. Up next: we sit down with two of Timberline’s academic experts to talk about master planning and what it takes to build a roadmap your campus can grow into, not just build to.
