Michael Bell ¦ Design
Mathematics Day Care Center ι Columbia ι Maryland ι The day care center is a building that could allow children to see time as more plastic. . . .
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Michael Bell ¦ Design
Mathematics Day Care Center ι Columbia ι Maryland ι The day care center is a building that could allow children to see time as more plastic. . . .
After five years in business, having overseen the care of more than a thousand children, the owners of a suburban Maryland day care center decided to move their business to a small site behind a new forty-acre commercial project on the edge of a watershed protected from development by zoning and the Environmental Protection Agency. (The site was located on the outskirts of Columbia, Maryland, a planned community near Washington, DC.) The clients’ foremost concern was creating an environment that would allow children to construct a space for themselves in the city. They were also concerned with how the building might influence the way the children perceived themselves.
The design strategy was to create a building that would contain a sense of immanent time—a building based on ideas of torsion, gravity, and buckling that could provide some new structure of time that might allow children to see the megalopolis in a different way. The day care center is a building that could allow children to see time as more plastic.
The thin-plate, pre-stressed concrete construction of the building shell is designed to resist buckling with a box-beam configuration. The walls, floor, and ceiling act together in a tuned configuration that induces a virtual reading of energies along their surfaces. Holes are cut in neutral planes for windows, with glass inset and recessed parallel to the building’s facade. The brittle shell creates a reading of spatial membranes like those found in agitated water, and the oculus roof garden causes a concentric wave ripple that must buckle to accommodate itself to the cubic building volume. The volumetric building shell in-folds - collapses - to form the extruded shelf in the cafeteria. Upstairs is a kindergarten, and downstairs is a day school and playground.
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