North Tampa Christian Academy

North Tampa Christian Academy is designed to support 21st-century learning and to foster a strong sense of community — a community-rooted, faith-based campus where every child feels known, valued, and encouraged to be their best. EDI led the project as Design Architect, guiding the work from educational planning and space programming through detailed design and the selection of furniture.

The result is a highly efficient master plan that braids indoor and outdoor space together to support 650 students from the Early Learning Center all the way through twelfth grade. Low-slung academic buildings frame shared courtyards, covered walkways, and a continuous outdoor commons, so that recess, lunch, and quiet study can move fluidly between classroom, porch, and garden — a rhythm well-suited to the Florida climate.

The design leverages the beauty of the landscape and wetlands that surround the site, integrating a stormwater pond as a natural feature and living learning tool at the very heart of the campus. Every building is positioned to open onto the landscape and pond, and students will be able to observe the health of the environment by monitoring the water in the pond and the surrounding wetlands. A rigorous, collaborative process with multiple stakeholders produced a set of guiding design principles, and those principles — connection to nature, community, and student agency — shape both the campus and every building within it.