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St. Thomas Childcare Centre
St. Thomas Childcare Centre
Canada
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Other Projects by CGS | Curran Gacesa Slote Architects
St. Thomas Childcare Centre
Canada
A primary objective of the design is to integrate the building into the children's learning process, encouraging them to engage through touching, moving, listening, exploring, and observing within a vibrant, inviting, and dynamic environment.
Highly visible and set just behind the historic downtown, this is intended as an exemplar childcare facility and high quality public building replacing a parking lot in a key location in the urban fabric adjacent the library and town hall, all affronting a new civic parkette. This unique new facility provides 90 new childcare spaces that are much needed in this fast growing community.
FORM
The Centre has a striking wedge shape form with long, sloping metal roofs from low kid-scale eaves at the street rising to high ceilings over the classrooms. The roof is broken up by several glass dormers to break down the building’s scale, while bringing light into the unusually tall central corridor, and adding richness to the space.
A significant pop-up roof clerestory marks the entrance and fills the lobby with abundant natural light. The welcoming entrance has a low kid-scale and broad covered entrance canopy stretching right to the curb edge for a sheltered drop-off with the warmth of its wood deck
A children’s-size porch swing at the main entrance is a welcoming feature and public amenity.
At the south wall the roof extends beyond the building to create a covered stroller porch, with dynamic varied ‘Swiss cheese’ windows making the building playful for the kids and serving as outdoor seating.
The porch keeps strollers out of the building, simplifying cleaning and avoiding clutter while keeping them weather protected. The dynamic wedge shape and round windows are unusual, memorable identity elements for this important public facility.
The building has generous windows to allow children constant and varied views of the community and landscape around it.
The facade is a mix of tactile pre-finished wood siding at kid-height with economical corrugated metal siding above that speaks to the region’s agricultural base. Varied windows and window bays and varied siding colours are cost effective ways to animate the simple facade.
SPACE
The superstructure is built entirely of locally made mass timber using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) Panels with glue-laminated columns and beams, allowing long spans and soaring ceilings right up to the roof. It importantly also adds the warmth of wood in most every room, a significant improvement over the usual painted drywall, and its panels gives the spaces higher, unencumbered space, which when combined with generous, tall window walls gives the classrooms a unique, light and airy spatial quality and a strong visual connection to the landscape. Wood columns were kept freestanding and visible where possible to provide richness and add spatial texture, while teaching how the building is built.
Classrooms all have friendly window bay seats and direct access to huge covered outdoor play porches for inclement days, also wrapped with built-in exterior benches. Acoustic panels ring the classroom walls to help absorb sound. Generous windows flood each classroom with light and sun. The bay seats include display plinths and wood ‘racks’ for displaying student art and teaching tools.
Thoughtful, deft, strategic use of splashes of colour, rich textures and sculptural light fixtures throughout provide good visual stimulation for the children.
We avoided acoustical tile ceilings to avoid the institutional norms and used wood doors for warmth and texture. Generous interior windows and sidelights open views and gives great transparency for easy supervision.
Large, covered play terraces from all classrooms for inclement days are in a generous rear play area with a path for wandering and playing.
Unique light fixtures and carefully patterned windows that extend close to the floor for kid access provide texture and visual interest.
ORDER
A central entrance leads into a small lobby bisected by a linear corridor and supervised by the Office and Staff Room. The corridor extends to exits at each end, the covered south entrance for stroller traffic. The structural system and budget demanded simplicity, but variations at the edges allow us to break the box to avoid banality.
Kids cubbies dot the corridor in alcoves outside classrooms to help organize belongings.
The building is a model of sustainability and energy efficiency.
Highly visible and set just behind the historic downtown, this is intended as an exemplar childcare facility and high quality public building replacing a parking lot in a key location in the urban fabric adjacent the library and town hall, all affronting a new civic parkette. This unique new facility provides 90 new childcare spaces that are much needed in this fast growing community.
FORM
The Centre has a striking wedge shape form with long, sloping metal roofs from low kid-scale eaves at the street rising to high ceilings over the classrooms. The roof is broken up by several glass dormers to break down the building’s scale, while bringing light into the unusually tall central corridor, and adding richness to the space.
A significant pop-up roof clerestory marks the entrance and fills the lobby with abundant natural light. The welcoming entrance has a low kid-scale and broad covered entrance canopy stretching right to the curb edge for a sheltered drop-off with the warmth of its wood deck
A children’s-size porch swing at the main entrance is a welcoming feature and public amenity.
At the south wall the roof extends beyond the building to create a covered stroller porch, with dynamic varied ‘Swiss cheese’ windows making the building playful for the kids and serving as outdoor seating.
The porch keeps strollers out of the building, simplifying cleaning and avoiding clutter while keeping them weather protected. The dynamic wedge shape and round windows are unusual, memorable identity elements for this important public facility.
The building has generous windows to allow children constant and varied views of the community and landscape around it.
The facade is a mix of tactile pre-finished wood siding at kid-height with economical corrugated metal siding above that speaks to the region’s agricultural base. Varied windows and window bays and varied siding colours are cost effective ways to animate the simple facade.
SPACE
The superstructure is built entirely of locally made mass timber using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) Panels with glue-laminated columns and beams, allowing long spans and soaring ceilings right up to the roof. It importantly also adds the warmth of wood in most every room, a significant improvement over the usual painted drywall, and its panels gives the spaces higher, unencumbered space, which when combined with generous, tall window walls gives the classrooms a unique, light and airy spatial quality and a strong visual connection to the landscape. Wood columns were kept freestanding and visible where possible to provide richness and add spatial texture, while teaching how the building is built.
Classrooms all have friendly window bay seats and direct access to huge covered outdoor play porches for inclement days, also wrapped with built-in exterior benches. Acoustic panels ring the classroom walls to help absorb sound. Generous windows flood each classroom with light and sun. The bay seats include display plinths and wood ‘racks’ for displaying student art and teaching tools.
Thoughtful, deft, strategic use of splashes of colour, rich textures and sculptural light fixtures throughout provide good visual stimulation for the children.
We avoided acoustical tile ceilings to avoid the institutional norms and used wood doors for warmth and texture. Generous interior windows and sidelights open views and gives great transparency for easy supervision.
Large, covered play terraces from all classrooms for inclement days are in a generous rear play area with a path for wandering and playing.
Unique light fixtures and carefully patterned windows that extend close to the floor for kid access provide texture and visual interest.
ORDER
A central entrance leads into a small lobby bisected by a linear corridor and supervised by the Office and Staff Room. The corridor extends to exits at each end, the covered south entrance for stroller traffic. The structural system and budget demanded simplicity, but variations at the edges allow us to break the box to avoid banality.
Kids cubbies dot the corridor in alcoves outside classrooms to help organize belongings.
The building is a model of sustainability and energy efficiency.
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