The Fresno Unified School Board will be able to accommodate bigger audiences for board meetings after a $4.6 million remodeling of the district’s downtown Education Center is completed this fall. It’s the first major overhaul since the district purchased the building in the 1970s, Andrew Corral, a Darden Architects principal who is the project’s lead architect, told GV Wire on Monday.
“It’s going to help the district capture a lot of space that was previously underutilized, especially in the first floor where the original post office was,” he said. But for the next couple of months, starting with Wednesday’s board meeting, the trustees will conduct meetings off-site at the Nutrition Center on Brawley Avenue in northwest Fresno. Monumental Moderne Style of Architecture The three-story cream-colored building at the corner of M and Tulare streets in downtown Fresno began its life as a federal building that housed what was then the city’s main downtown post office on the first floor, a courtroom on the second floor, and other federal offices.
Even after the school district purchased the building, the small post office remained in operation until it was closed in 2018. , was designed in the Monumental Moderne style of architecture by Lewis A. Simon & William Dewey Foster, Architects, according to the local register.
The building opened in 1939 as a Works Progress Administration federal project, Corral said. Many such projects included artwork specific to the buildi.