ICON Architecture

The Monsignor James Coyle High School, also known as Taunton Catholic Middle School, is a two-story Gothic Revival-style school that was completed in 1933. The historic Coyle High School building and site are beautifully transformed into fifty units of affordable family housing providing sustainable solutions that build communities.

Carrying on the legacy of the earlier Irish immigrants that prompted the need for the original high school, the Monsignor Coyle School building perseveres in providing a better way of life for families in need of affordable housing.  The site design incorporates the restoration of the original school’s historic front landscape facing the greater community.

The bulk of the 7+ acre site’s vegetation and layout retains much of its current character at its edges–with the solid masonry school structure standing prominently on Summer St presenting with a historic two-story, white marble front entrance.  A humble new three-story addition is built at the southwest corner of the building, adjacent to the rear wing. The addition, as designed with a lower height than the school, combined with the site’s change in grade, dense vegetation, and intervening residential structures is intentionally not visible from the public right-of-way. The regular fenestration pattern and flat roof of the addition are designed to be compatible with the existing building, while the smooth horizontal cementitious siding sufficiently differentiates it as new construction.

The celebrated school is re-used and “sensitively renovated,” maintaining the overall massing and brick façade with marble entry and window detailing, per the National Park Service Guidelines for Historic Renovation.  Designed with a focus on community, a variety of living environments are offered from units within classrooms, offering abundant daylight and high ceilings in the solid masonry structure, to conveniently accessible units in the new construction. Complementing this are spacious community gathering spaces in the historic building, offering gracious family amenities in an adaptive reuse context.