A tiny learning center built by students has an outsized impact on city residents and provides a powerful symbol of renewal.
Objectives: The Community Learning Center operated out of a tiny apartment in a public housing development for years, achieving great success in getting at-risk kids on track to graduation and college. The development is near the center of a small, once prosperous city that has seen a huge loss of jobs as industries closed down or moved overseas. The Center had unlimited energy and ambition but very limited space.
In 2008 the Housing Authority received a state grant that would cover half the cost of a new 2,000 square foot facility, and made arrangements with the local vocational/technical high school to provide the labor they hoped would make up the difference. Our firm was brought in to work with the students on design, and to coordinate the efforts of the Housing Authority and its residents, the Learning Center staff, and the high school’s Center for Technical Education.
Design and Construction: What emerged from the process was a simple barn-like volume with a shed roof opening up to the street. South facing windows shaded by deciduous trees provide passive solar heating in the winter and connect the interior to the city outside. Projecting bays, colored fiber-cement panels and stock windows are carefully composed to animate the primary volume on the cheap. The interior is a single, subtly articulated space that one teacher can monitor, with laser-cut “green” particle board partitions and operable walls to provide a variety of study areas and flexible community meeting spaces.
As work progressed costs soon exhausted the budget. A public campaign focusing on renderings of the building raised in-kind contributions from local businesses that allowed the building to reach completion.
Innovations:Ambitious design aspirations implemented by an architect-led community process leveraged very limited funds to create a place that embodies a city's hopes.
Material Used:
1. Pella – Windows – Casement and Fixed windows
2. Corelita Stella – Light fixtures – Pendant fixtures
3. James Hardie – Cladding – Fiber Cement Panels
4. Collins Pine FreeForm – Built-in elements – Particle Board
5. Kohler – Sinks, Toilets
6. GAF - Shingles
