Parkland High School resembles Millennium Falcon

[Dalton]

It's pretty uncanny.

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It’s no Jedi Mind Trick and probably just a coincidence but a Lehigh Valley High school’s uncanny resemblance to a Stars Wars icon has Sci-Fi fans reveling and the Internet abuzz.

A satellite image of Parkland High School looks eerily similar to the Millennium Falcon spaceship made famous in the Stars Wars Trilogy.

The story about the 13-year-old school looking like a Sci-Fi symbol first broke on Reddit then was picked up by the Morning Call, Huffington Post and dozens of other sites.

But was the design by ATS&R Planners/Architects/Engineers of the East Whitehall Township school building intentionally made to look like the ship famously piloted by Han Solo, Lando Calrissian and Chewbacca?

No, it's just a coincidence, school officials tell E!’s The Soup. The school district confirmed with NBC10 that the building wasn't designed to look like the famous starship.

The architect himself, ATS&R's Dean Beeninga, also says the Star Wars-likeness was unintentional and that he only recently heard about the Falcon coincidence. But he does wish that he had thought up the idea especially since his seven children are big Stars Wars fans.

Beeninga's firm's style clustering schools into a circular design that forms a campus that’s more college-like than traditional high schools often draw comparisons to spaceships or even crabs -- Another of his firm’s designs is Central Bucks South which looks like a crab or one of those ships from Tron -- but this was the first case when a design was compared to a specific item.

Maybe this was part of a greater plan.

Beeninga points out that when the letters of his firm ATS&R are rearranged they for “STAR.”

“Maybe this is some sort of cosmic alignment,” he says.

Beeninga is relieved that Parkland doesn’t look like another Star Wars icon:

“I’m glad I’m on the Republic’s side. I’d be devastated if it looked like the (Empire’s) Death Star.”

If coincidence, intentional or just an ode to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars-looking school has made headlines nonetheless.

[Frank Hipper]

...I’d be devastated if it looked like the (Empire’s) Death Star...

He should pay a price for his lack of vision.

[Dalton]

...I’d be devastated if it looked like the (Empire’s) Death Star...

He should pay a price for his lack of vision.

Well, that kinda made its way through the cultural landscape with the old AT&T logo.

[Havok]

Question: Did the author really need to insert "Empire's" before Death Star?

[PeZook]

How can it POSSIBLY be coincidence? That parking lot didn't have to trace an outline in this way, it could've just been a square lot

[HMS Sophia]

My wife (when asked) said it looked like a cylons head... Which I can see...

[Rogue 9]

How can it POSSIBLY be coincidence? That parking lot didn't have to trace an outline in this way, it could've just been a square lot

It looks like it was conforming to the roads around it.

[Questor]

I don't see it.

[Haruko]

Wow, that high school has far more parking space than most high schools in my city, and it is not like there is a lack of space here in desert-all-around-us San Bernardino.

[Questor]

It's a 3200 student school this year, and I'd guess there's a decent amount of room to grow.

[Sea Skimmer]

Its also a pretty rural district; while close to Allentown, Allentown has its own district and high school so a very large percentage of the kids are going to get driven to school or drive themselves. Ego lots of parking and roads.

[Haruko]

It's a 3200 student school this year, and I'd guess there's a decent amount of room to grow.

Wow, I thought San Bernardino schools had a lot of students. The average high school here is at 800-1000.

[tim31]

Eight tennis courts, an athletics centre and several baseball fields.

Is that above average, even for a school of that size?

[Esquire]

I wouldn't think so. My high school had ~1000 students, and we had multiple sports fields and two gyms with attendant locker rooms, etc. Multiply that by three and a bit and sticking the whole assemblage in its own athletic center doesn't seem at all strange.

[Skywalker_T-65]

My high school had ~2,000 or so people in it. Until it got wrecked in the tornado anyway (I live in Joplin). I wish I had a pic of what the new high school is going to look like though...it resembles a college more than a HS.

(But it sure doesn't hold a candle to a school that looks like the Falcon! )

[CarsonPalmer]

Eight tennis courts, an athletics centre and several baseball fields.

Is that above average, even for a school of that size?

I don't think so. They probably need it to have room for all the gym classes. Some of the baseball fields are probably softball fields, too-when they have baseball games there they will probably do Freshman-JV-Varsity all at the same time, so they'd need three fields.

[Gandalf]

How many gym classes does a normal high school have?

[CarsonPalmer]

How many gym classes does a normal high school have?

Well, my high school had slightly less than a thousand kids-we had either two or three gym classes going on each period, and we were a Catholic school that only required two semesters of phys-ed over four years. I don't know the law in Pennsylvania, but New Jersey's public schools required a semester of phys-ed for every year of school; the school where my father worked, which was a little bit smaller than this, had around six classes of over thirty each period.

[xthetenth]

My school had 3k or so kids, and I think we had three gym classes going on in gyms and one in the pool. Then again, my high school was ten stories tall and in downtown Manhattan, so that's probably not the norm. A period was required per student per day, iirc.