Allencrest Community Learning Center

Leominster, MA, United States

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Allencrest Community Learning Center

Leominster, MA, United States

Firm

Abacus Architects+ Planners

Type

Government + Health › Community Center

YEAR

2012

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 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 to make up the difference. A sliver of space on the edge of the development was set aside for the building.

Design and Construction:
Working with staff and students, we designed 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 space that one teacher can monitor, with laser-cut particle board partitions and operable walls to provide a variety of study areas and flexible community meeting spaces.

Sustainable design features include high and low operable windows for natural ventilation, high performance insulation and rain screen cladding, a high efficiency condensing mode boiler, and an energy recovery ventilation system. Systems are exposed to provide a lesson in sustainable design principles.

Innovations:
Ambitious design aspirations implemented by an architect-led community process leveraged very limited funds to create a dynamic place that embodies the city's hopes.