Avance Houston Chapter, a non-profit organization, provides daycare services for low-income families in and around the Houston area. In addition to daycare, Avance also provides healthcare, nutritional care, and they teach parenting skills to frequently young parents of the children in their program.
For this project, Avance asked the architect to design a new facility that would be a special place where staff, children and parents could feel at home while they work, play, teach and learn. This is especially important to Avance because they have often occupied bland and uninspired spaces, like the typical “temporary” beige classroom buildings found on school campuses everywhere. In fact, they were running their program out of a temporary building prior to moving into this new facility. The real challenge was to come up with a creative and economical solution for this ongoing problem.
Faced with a very low budget, the deisgn solution uses inexpensive materials and traditional construction methods while incorporating non-traditional compositions of form, texture and color. Simple shading devices were designed to create a play of light and shadow. Carefully placed vivid color on the exterior identifies the project as unique. These simple architectural features distinguish the project as a special place on campus among other less engaging buildings.
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