Out of the Basement:
Discovering the Value of Child Care Facilities

by Carl Sussman

"We were tired of lousy space in church basements," explained Sandy Waddell. "We thought the real estate crash might give us an opportunity to do better."

An 18-year veteran of Head Start, Waddell was then director of the North Shore Community Action Program's (NSCAP) Head Start program. Having followed a well-worn career path from teacher to director, she headed a 207-child collection of Head Start and child care programs housed at three sites north of Boston. NSCAP's Head Start programs served low-income children in the small working-class cities of Peabody, Sales and Beverly and in surrounding communities.

Waddell eventually leased space in a former Peabody, Massachusetts, school building that had been converted to public housing for the elderly. Because the space was a few feet below grade, the organization technically had again leased basement space. But after a dramatic renovation, the center suggests that quality space is both more achievable and more important than providers typically recognize. Metaphorically at least, this center emerged from the basement.

The new center

A tour of NSCAP’s bright and spacious Peabody center awakens the senses to the possibilities. This is a building thoughtfully designed for both children and staff. Entering the building everyone passes through a reception area, an open space of work stations with plenty of visibility. The arrangement channels visitors through the office, enabling staff to welcome all children and establishing control over access to the center. The architect clustered the social services offices and the conference room on one side of the entry and the administrative offices on the other side. Two brightly colored glass doors straight ahead, under a sign identifying them as the entrance to Play Street, lead to the children’s domain.

The architect's intent

Architect Gail Sullivan sought to create an environment that children would associate with a home rather than an institution. "What is a friendly place to a child?" the architect asked. "A home! Since children pictorially represent a house as a gable (triangle-shaped roof) over a box with a door and two windows, that was my starting point." The gabled-house motif repeats itself frequently along Play Street. The corridor became the first front in Sullivan’s campaign to create an environment emphasizing the warmth and security that a child might associate with a homelike setting rather than the cool institutional feel that the building, its use, and a tight budget might otherwise dictate.

Typical corridors convey a building’s institutional identity through their sterile and featureless design. They tend to be boring passageways—voids between one place and another. But as the transition from the center’s entrance to its classrooms, the corridor ought to be a vehicle for establishing a strong and positive sense of place. Sullivan decided to transform the corridor into a streetscape with the visual stimulation of the outdoors, a contrast with the more soothing, home-like ambiance she sought to create in the classrooms.

Play Street is the metaphor employed for the corridor connecting the four classrooms, kitchen, and other spaces. It’s a broad and brightly lit boulevard of checkered floor tiles and colorfully painted walls. Sullivan, who specializes in designing child care centers, softened the normally straight and monotonous corridor by indenting the wall at intervals to create variety and details. Pulling the walls back in places created larger spaces where people naturally congregate at points along the corridor. A drain pipe running along the floor became an opportunity to build a little bench.

Every classroom has double-hung windows like those characteristically used in residential construction and Dutch doors that open onto Play Street. In addition to permitting easy monitoring of the classrooms, the windows and doors allow the corridor to borrow natural light from the adjoining classrooms, and they introduce prominent residential design details. Sullivan reinforced the homelike feeling with unique entries to each classroom resembling the front door to a residence. She designed each façade individually to symbolically represent a house. These architectural elements simultaneously reinforce the street motif of the corridor and carefully cultivate the warm, safe, intimate feel of a home in each classroom. The unique entries also have important benefits for young children, providing visual clues that help them identify their classroom; they individualize the classrooms and help children know where they belong.

The corridor becomes wide in front of the Head Start Cafe, another feature along Play Street. The large commercial kitchen, a legacy of the high school cafeteria that formerly occupied this space, had strongly influenced the decision to lease the site. The program used the kitchen to turn out 207 lunches and snacks each day for the three NSCAP centers. Long sliding windows arranged under the Head Start Cafe sign and exterior-style light fixtures create a storefront through which children passing to and from classrooms can view food preparation activities and exchange waves and greetings with the kitchen staff.

Head Start encourages parent involvement. Parental involvement takes a tangible form in the center’s Parents’ Room, which is separated from Play Street by a glass wall. Sullivan’s design reflects her belief that "people need their own turf." Just as the staff’s space is distinct from the children’s territory, the Parents’ Room provides an area that the parents "own." Parents are encouraged to spend time in the center, and this room gives them a home base. They can hold meetings there, use the computer, review written resources, or just relax. It is stocked with materials on educational and employment opportunities, parenting, and other topics that reflect the program’s commitment to parent as well as child development.

Rehabilitation of existing spaces presents problems, especially with a limited budget. Sometimes those problems can be transformed into opportunities. The play pavilion at one end of Play Street, which emerged from just such an opportunity, is a small interior room surrounded by a wheelchair ramp on three sides and a half flight of stairs on the remaining wall. The architect transformed the room into a giant sandbox by removing the upper walls on all four sides. She constructed a foot-high threshold in the doorway and finished it with large spherical lights at each corner.

The wall between the sandbox and the glass entryway partition separating the housing for older adults from the child care center features peekaboo cutouts and a dramatic paint job. The gabled sandbox entrance and the little peekaboo windows also allow seniors sitting in their lobby to watch the children playing and interact with them through the glass partition.

continue story