How They Pulled It Off: An Architectural Chicken Coop in a San Francisco Schoolyard

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

At Rosa Parks Elementary School in San Francisco, one of the most active classrooms happens to be outside. It’s a teaching garden where students learn about plants, water conservation, and biodiversity. The garden is also the site of a striking new chicken coop designed collaboratively between the students and architect David Darling, whose son attended the school. Standing 12 feet tall, with a dramatic butterfly roof, the coop provides a safe home for the school’s five hens—named Pikachu, Totoro, Sunny, Pyopyo, and Oreo—who are campus celebrities. Every morning students open the coop so the hens can scratch around the garden then herd them back inside at the end of the day. "Kids get to understand where their food comes from, they develop empathy with the chickens, and they get to see this microcosm of all these things, which is pretty cool," Darling says.

Building the chicken coop was a collective effort between Darling and a group of parents of students at the school who raised funds, coordinated material donations, and worked with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) administration to obtain all the necessary permits for the project. Located on a former parking lot, the teaching garden had been a makeshift space that was showing signs of wear and tear. The garden had a coop already, which was located over a catch basin, and as a result was severely damaged by flooding. Meanwhile, a pack of rats were helping themselves to chicken feed inside the coop. "The coop was actually a breeding ground for the rats, and the rats were nesting under the coop," Darling says. "It was just like a complete disaster."

Darling redesigned the coop to make it cleaner for the hens, easier for the students to access, and more attuned to the hydrology of the site. "Chicken coops are in this weird margin between being a building for people in a building for chickens," Darling says. Fortunately, the design is tailored to both groups.

First, Darling moved the coop to slightly higher topography within the garden then specified a concrete slab foundation with stainless-steel mesh extending 18 inches below grade to deter the rats. Then he designed the coop, which is roughly 100 square feet, to be spacious enough for students to walk inside so that they can easily clean out the space and bring in food and water.