The Albuquerque Academy’s red bricks line the paths and envelop the buildings, stick out of place and make students trip over them, but like all other aspects of the school’s architecture, they too have a very specific purpose. However, while the bricks remained a constant theme across campus as the school underwent significant changes, other aspects of the school’s architecture changed significantly. Albuquerque Academy was founded in 1955, in the basement of a church on Fourth Street. Shortly thereafter the school moved to Osuna and Edith, Sandia Prep’s current location. At the Osuna location the Academy consisted of three buildings with an additional building for the Head of School’s office. At the time, the student body was made up of about 180 boys with 15 faculty members. When the school chose to move from the Osuna location, Albert G. Simms decided that if the school was going to grow he wanted it to prosper and therefore gave the school large pieces of land, stock and funding. Ground was broken in the fall of 1965 and one year later Albuquerque Academy moved to its current location.

Blueprints for the original campus included many buildings that are on campus today, but there were also plans that never came into effect or changed over the years. The East Campus Dining Hall was part of the blueprints for the campus; however, the building was remodeled as the student body grew. The East Campus Gym was also in the original plans. North Hall and Brown Hall, then called South Hall, both existed, but North Hall was home to the Junior School, or grades five through seven, and Brown Hall housed grades eight through twelve. Many of the rooms in North and Brown Hall were science labs. The school also included the administration building, which originally included the library and some art classrooms. The final building that was incorporated in the campus’ blueprints was a chapel. At the time chapels were common aspects of most independent schools. While chapels are commonly associated as a religious symbol, the ones in independent schools at the time were “more commonly something laical,” said Richard Adam, Archivist. However, in the end the school decided not to build the chapel due to a lack of funding. Many aspects of the school’s architecture are based off of the St. Louis Country Day School, where former Head of School Ashby Harper worked before he came to the Academy.

The primary factor that caused most of the changes to the school’s architecture was the increase in student population. In 1984 the first class with an equal number of boys and girls was admitted to the Academy. While some girls had been admitted to grades 9-12 in 1973, the population was skewed so that there were four boys to every one girl. As the student body continued to grow the fifth grade was eliminated due to space issues. A campus which had originally been built for less than 500 students was now rapidly approaching a student body of over 1000. Therefore, in 1985 the Lower School was built and library and science buildings were built in 1991. “Part of the concept of building the library and the science building was to have something that would tend to draw students from both campuses towards the middle, and also feel like less of a distance when you had something in between,” said Gary Gordon, School Treasurer.

According to Adam, if the school were to receive adequate funding, there are a few buildings that it would like to build. The school would like to build a new Experiential Education building due to the limited amount of space in the current Experiential Education offices. An extension to the Fine Arts building is under consideration, given that space is also limited in the building. “We have plans for an auditorium that can fit the whole school,” said William Kuh, English Faculty Member. “Who knows where we will put [the buildings], or if we will build them.”

Albuquerque Academy has grown and changed significantly in the last 55 years. The school’s growth, both in population and size, resulted from the demand for the education that the school provided. However, one of the factors that has remained important to the school over the years has been its architecture. “I think that if you have beautiful buildings that are well taken care of, then students tend to be more serious and engaged in what they’re doing,” said Gordon. “I’m a big believer that schools need to beautiful….you want places of open expression and open ideas and you want imagination and you can’t really have any of those things with buildings that aren’t elegant.”