Designers of the new child development center at Portland Community College‘s Rock Creek campus, in Washington County, had to account for two very different groups: children and college students.

“It’s a fun, energizing, open and friendly space,” PCC project manager Zahava Jones said. “We wanted to see that and I think we accomplished that. It’s a simple, house-style design, but it still fits with the college atmosphere.”

The $7 million, bond-funded facility is now substantially completed. It features a single story of wood-framed construction atop a slab-on-grade foundation. The 7,800-square-foot building will be able to hold up to 88 children, in separate infant, toddler and preschool classroom areas.

Efforts to secure a third-party vendor to manage and operate the child care center are ongoing, Jones said, but added that Portland-based Fruit & Flower is one of the leading contenders.

Ground was broken in spring 2018, and officials expect the facility to open by the start of the 2019 fall semester. Child care will be reserved for parents enrolled at PCC, but may be opened to the public in the future.

Scott | Edwards Architecture designed the building, while Shapiro Didway handled design of the exterior grounds. Kirby Nagelhout Construction is the general contractor.

“The challenge I think for the design on this project was to create a building that’s appropriate for a college campus,” said Bob Smith, a project manager for Scott | Edwards Architecture. “With the exterior we used very durable materials, and we tried to blend it with the palette of the rest of the campus with its concrete and metal and wood accents.”

The goal for the interior was to create a “playful, enjoyable and exciting” environment, Smith said.

“We tried to do that with colors and accents,” he said. “But we’re recognizing that it still is a campus building, and it needs to be resilient and durable.”

The facility was designed to resemble a family residence. It features gable ends and a pitched roof, with large bay windows adorning the main hallway.

Composite siding, with a surface manufactured from rice husks, dominates the exterior. The siding is sustainable, but also durable and able to effectively absorb paint and other finishes.

The external cladding is a limestone plaster formulation that comes with an alkali- and UV-resistant permanent finish.

“We approached this looking at the durability and quality of the materials for everything we selected,” Smith said.

Metal panels were used near the entrance to provide a waterfall effect in combination with an ADA-mandated wheelchair ramp.

Special attention was given to the outdoor play area.

“We tried to vary an outdoor learning environment and give the kids play on a variety of different surfaces,” said Carl Liebhardt, a landscape associate with Shapiro Didway. “There are seating areas for outdoor education and there are stepping services for motor skills play. We tried to allow the outdoor area to be a fluid environment for the kids to run around and play in.”

Honey locust trees will provide shade, and ginkgos, dogwoods and maples will serve as accents.

The outdoor play area was also carefully landscaped with sand and other native species along with a host of wooden play features carved from Oregon white oak.

The project team is aiming for Earth Advantage gold certification. Brightworks provided early energy modeling.

“We have a very robust envelope, and we’ve worked closely with PCC to design it as resilient as it can be,” Smith said. “We haven’t really done anything exceptional with over-insulating, but we made some upgrades along the way as part of the Earth Advantage transition.”

The post College campus gains space for kids appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Designing a building with children in mind demands a different touch than most commercial architecture projects.

It requires the careful use of color and light to create spaces that encourage learning and collaborative play. And in the case of Portland Community College’s new child development center on its Rock Creek campus, there also is a strong desire to connect the spaces inside with those outdoors.

“Lighting is a big thing,” said project lead Allyson Oar, an architect with Scott | Edwards Architecture. “We want children to feel connected, not just to the teacher and the inside, but to the outside as well.”

General contractor Kirby Nagelhout Construction Co. of Bend broke ground earlier this month on the 7,800-square-foot facility. It is a new ground-up building with a $7 million bond-funded budget intended to serve as many as 67 children of PCC students and staff. It will have three pre-kindergarten classrooms and an infant classroom, as well as a multi-purpose room that can be opened to the outside via a vertical door.

“We thought a lot about color and how it can help foster a soothing environment for children to learn in,” Oar said. “So, we’re using mostly blues and greens. We wanted to have a connection with this idea that children are connecting with the environment outside, so we felt that pastel blues and greens would give a more natural feeling and a calmer environment.”

To further this idea, nature-based play elements such as logs, sand and a rolling landscape are being used in the facility’s outdoor play area.

Another notable design aspect on the building’s exterior involves the use of standing seam metal and various woods to reflect the appearance of other buildings on the Rock Creek Campus. It also is being constructed to achieve Earth Advantage Certification (EAC) Gold for sustainability.

“It’s actually very similar, but a bit more affordable for clients to get the certification,” Oar said. “LEED can be time consuming and cumbersome for the design team and costly for the client, so some of the smaller certification systems can be more appealing. They push the contractors and designers to push for similar efficiencies at a lower cost.”

Zahava Jones, project manager for PCC, agreed.

“LEED has really been on the forefront, but now there are other programs that are great for smaller projects,” Jones said. “Energy is a big hog, so if you have good systems in place and use healthy materials and the siding is done appropriately to maximize the sunlight, it’s great that there are other programs out there that can help achieve the same goal.”

Jones noted the project will also include a rooftop solar array, but its size and composition have yet to be determined.

Many of the materials used in the project also required careful consideration, Oar said.

“It goes hand in hand with sustainability,” she said. “With little kids crawling around on the ground, we wanted floor surfaces that aren’t toxic; we wanted everything to be as natural and resilient as possible.”

That goal extended from the linoleum used to line the floors to making sure only paints containing no volatile organic compounds were used.

In the end, the project, which is scheduled for completion by spring 2019, is about improving the student experience, according to Jones.

“It’s just really important to know that this is a student service,” she said. “Our goal at PCC is to help students achieve success and give them the best chance to complete their degree or certificate program, so having this on campus will benefit the students greatly.”

The post Child development center design connects space inside and out appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.