Boise High School Campus
Washington St. between 9th and 11th Sts., Boise, IDBoise High School is both historically and architecturally significant: historically, as the only public high school in the late 1950s of the state's capital city; architecturally, as a group of handsome and diverse buildings clearly illustrating three periods of developmental style, all designed by Tourtellotte and Company and Troutellotte and Hummel over a period of thirty years.
The most important of these buildings is the high school itself. It is architecturally significant as a neo-classical revival monument, in a state where they are rare. In fact, the high school appropriates some of the classical vocabularies--the tripartite form, the full pedimented portico, and the particular affection for the anthemion--which distinguishes the older and much grander capitol. The central section of the capitol was begun in 1904; the east wing of the high school was in 1908. The beau-arts design was produced only after the Statesman rallied public opinion and the school board against an early proposal incorporating a heavily medieval exterior. The cost of the entire structure, which was completed in 1920, was projected at $250,000 in 1909.
The Industrial Arts and gymnasium buildings contribute to an impressive ensemble. The 1920 Industrial Arts building is significant in showing some of the same neo-classical devices--the slight outset porticoes over round-arched doorways, the classical anthemia--stylized and rendered in pragmatic concrete; the result is at once appropriate to the more prosaic function of a shop building, stylistically continuous with the main building, and illustrative of the tendency to simplify and geometricize that which was going on at the end of the 1910s. This tendency is also apparent in the masonry treatment of the scene house at the rear of the central, 1920 section of the main building.
The gymnasium, dating seventeen years later, is a fine example of the institutional art deco design of Frank Hummel, which he applied to Public Works Administration projects throughout the Depression. A generational peer of even greater distinction is Boise Junior High School. The total cost was reported to be $130,000.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.