The New York City School Construction Authority is in the midst of a $13 billion capital plan to build 90 new school buildings for some of the city ‘s 1.1 million schoolchildren, and they won’t be the windowless, concrete dungeons of old.

The new schools are meant to be fully-wired pedagogic palaces of light and air, designed to facilitate learning and a sense of community, and serve as more-welcoming centerpieces for the surrounding neighborhood.

The question for architect Aaron Schwarz of Perkins Eastman was how to accomplish that task for the Mott Haven School Project in a rundown section of the South Bronx, a place literally on the other side of the (Metro-North) tracks that has been left outside the slow but steady gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood. The 2,400-seat campus, the biggest single school construction project in New York City history, is scheduled to open for the 2009 school year.

“It’s a fabulous opportunity,” Mr. Schwarz said. “Everyone now has agreed that physical environments are integral to the way teachers teach and students learn. We wanted to use a modernist palette while working within the construction parameters of the city to maximize the site in a secure way but opening it for the community around it.”

The $230 million project will house four small schools — a charter school, a middle school, and two high schools — all with distinct buildings, but each rising out of a common base. The 280,000-square-foot site features a football field, basketball courts, a 4,000-square-foot library and a 600-seat auditorium, each shared by all four of the schools.

The vice president for architecture and engineering at the construction authority, Bruce Barrett, said Chancellor Joel Klein has focused on building small schools because of the feeling of community they create within the educational environment. “But typically those schools don’t have the same kinds of amenities of the 2,000 seat high schools that were built 25 years ago,” he said. “The size and the amount of diverse specialty spaces we could provide makes this a really unique project.”

To foster that sense of community, Mr. Schwarz designed the buildings to have small dining rooms served by a shared kitchen, wide stairs and corridors to foster informal interaction, and easy navigation patterns so new students don’t feel overwhelmed.

It is Mr. Schwarz’s hope that the campus won’t be just for students, but can serve as a nexus for the entire neighborhood and help facilitate the transformation of the South Bronx.

“Schools are really becoming more like community centers,” he said. “Parents meet parents, parents meet other students, parents meet nonparents. It re-knits the community together. To have that happen at a site that has basically been abandoned creates a nucleus that can spread to housing, that can spread to safety.”

A neighborhood real estate broker and founder of the Haven Heights Group, Sid Miller, sees the Mott Haven campus as a nod to the Mott Haven that was, not the neighborhood that it is becoming.

“There is a conflict here between families and the well-educated new population who are taking over all of the quality housing and pushing out the poor,” he said. “It’s going to give educational possibilities to the families who are here. The young people moving in won’t use that facility.”

Although the plan was originally spearheaded by local nonprofits, it met much resistance as it wound its way through the corridors of power. The site previously hosted a rail yard, a laundry, a service station, and a manufactured gas plant. Both the soil and groundwater were found to contain mercury, lead, and carcinogens such as benzene. The city spent $30 million on remediation, but last month a group of parents and teachers announced a lawsuit against the construction authority, charging the agency with failing to meet the requirements of the State Environmental Quality Review Act.

Late last year, the City Council voted against the project, claiming that the school should be reserved for students who live in the area instead of serving students citywide under Mayor Bloomberg’s school choice plans. The council eventually voted to approve the school in January.