This seven-classroom Early Education Center (EEC) was the leading half of a master plan for the District that included a new 73 unit affordable housing development for families. The principal challenge of the project has been to order a steep, tight urban site in a way that maximizes programmatic utility, experiential diversity, and community presence. While its play yard is secured inside a courtyard framed by the classroom components, the classrooms themselves bring both light and views from the surrounding neighborhood.
The classroom elements are shaped to provide height variability and volumetric freedom to the interior spaces, while providing a sense of rhythmic, rolling profile to the street. The dramatic topography is employed by tucking parking under the EEC, and by echoing the fall in the sidewalk with a parallel falling grade across the playground. In this way, the treed playground centerpiece – with its grassed terraces, ramps and stairs, integral to motor play and physical discovery – makes the most of an otherwise highly cramped urban site.
