K-12, universities, colleges, and technical schools have multiple buildings to manage on their campuses to ensure students, faculty, staff, and visitors can occupy and utilize these spaces. Education is important for the growth of not only the individual students, but entire communities. Classrooms, lecture halls, and other learning spaces are uniquely challenging — they must feel welcoming and inspiring, yet be able to hold up to the thousands of students who will occupy them over decades. Equally as important is the design of administrative offices, cafeterias, libraries, gymnasiums, field houses, and other spaces that make up an educational institution.
There are many pieces involved in this complex puzzle, and ours is designing sound structures. ZFI Engineering delivers well-designed buildings and infrastructure shaped by an understanding of the educational needs of each educational establishment. We have close ties in the communities where we work and live. Our teams draw on local expertise to support schools, universities, local authorities, and government bodies in meeting the high standards demanded by today’s students while responding to the challenges of increasing budgetary constraints, the ever-growing reliance on technology, new expectations from students, and security and safety standards.
ZFI has impacted campuses across Oklahoma, from private elementary schools to the largest universities. Each project presents a need for robust structural systems and an understanding of the required functionality of the space. Flexible programming and reconfigurable spaces using features like movable partitions are necessary to facilitate the changing needs of many educational institutions.
Our region also necessitates protection from severe weather events, which frequently results in the integration of ICC-500 and FEMA 361- compliant storm shelters into the project. Tight budgets require that these unique structures must serve the dual purposes of protection during the storm while still being usable learning or support spaces year-round.