A neutral design palette helps a new day care center reflect its surroundings
Olive View-UCLA Medical Center (OVMC) in Sylmar, Calif., is an acute care hospital serving California’s San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope Valleys. Located on 33 acres, several of the center’s ancillary structures, including the OVMC Early Education and Day Care Center, were destroyed in the November 2008 wildfires. Since many of the medical center’s employees’ children attended the day care center, the County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors identified the construction of a new facility as a top priority. The new day care center was completed in November 2014.
According to Harold Fremer, principal at HH Fremer Architects, Santa Monica, Calif., the original day care was located in a 1920s structure that was heavily modified to qualify as a licensed day care center. After the fires, a temporary center was located in another building on the medical center’s campus.
The new 6,000-square-foot center features a reception area, staff room and offices, classrooms, laundry facilities, a full kitchen, and indoor and outdoor activity areas. Native drought-tolerant plantings surround two playgrounds: one 4,000-square-foot area designed for toddlers and another approximately 1/2-acre for preschool children ages 2 and up.
To unify and enclose the interior areas, a sweeping roof floats above clerestory windows before curving down to form the shaded colonnade. Providing shelter for outdoor activities adjacent to the playground areas, the colonnade canopy also reduces solar heat gain in the classrooms.
Separation of Spaces
The new facility was designed to accommodate nearly 100 infants, toddlers, preschoolers and supporting staff. “During the programming study, the day school staff and management emphasized the importance of organizing the interior spaces with infants and toddlers in a more secure, architecturally defined space, while the preschool-aged children occupy the larger classrooms defined by the architectural umbrella, which provides access to a shaded galleria and then to an expansive outdoor classroom,” explains Fremer.
To differentiate between the two areas, the design uses smooth troweled cement plaster for the cladding of the dimensionally scaled classrooms, which is expressed by lower ceiling heights and smaller room sizes. For the older students, metal panel cladding, vaulted ceilings and exposed steel frames create a more architecturally expressive and expansive “educational umbrella,” free of structural encumbrances.
The project features Alucobond aluminum composite material (ACM) panels from 3A Composites USA Inc., Davidson, N.C., which were selected to contrast the other primary exterior finishes cladding the portions of the building where the infant and toddler classrooms are located. The metal panel system over the exposed steel structure creates the appearance of a huge educational umbrella that helps facilitate the early education experience.
Epic Metals Corp., Rankin, Pa., provided the metal decking system, which Fremer explains was broken into sections in segments to accommodate the radius. Additionally, he says the Alucobond metal wall panel system was manufactured with a radius and mounted along the outside of the curved structural steel members with several types of attachment mechanisms. HH Fremer Architects designed the exposed structural steel components along with Epic Metals and the structural engineer, Los Angeles-based Parker Resnick Structural Engineering.
A Neutral Color Palette
The facility is wrapped in a material palette that is sensitive to and reflects the surrounding landscape, which includes numerous types of trees, brush and expansive areas of hillside growth, as well as outcroppings of rocks of all different colors, shapes and textures. To not compete with the surroundings, Fremer says the design team selected a palette of materials to express an architectural language and complement the surrounding area.
The facility owners weren’t looking for bright colors or a bright color palette, and instead wanted the building to blend into the environment. “The one multicolored wall at the entrance was our expression of trying to capture the colors we noticed within the environment and trying to replicate that within a portion of the building,” Fremer explains.
The multicolored panels are Minerit fiber cement panels from American Fiber Cement Corp., Littleton, Colo., mounted on a rainscreen system. Fremer says the panels are stained with a color palette that reflected the indigenous array of colors within the vicinity of the project site and in the foothills of Sylmar. “In addition,” he adds, “there were two large oak trees that were used to define the building footprint and are used in our color palette.”
Design Restrictions
Built primarily out of funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the project team was faced with numerous program and design restrictions. For example, Fremer says the area of glazing could not exceed the amount the previous day care center contained. Additionally, Fremer says the area of the building could not exceed that of the original structure, which required the design team to plan the facility precisely to qualify for licensing under California’s Title 22.
Fremer says sustainability was emphasized at the beginning of the design process as a key goal by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. The firm worked closely with the department to maximize every opportunity to exceed California’s Title 24 energy conservation goals. By using passive solar design, installing cool roofing materials and maximizing natural light, Fremer says the project exceeded the required 15 percent energy efficient goals by almost 20 percent. “We wanted to make this building as energy efficient as we possibly could,” he notes.
The day care facility is jointly operated by the County of Los Angeles and the Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles, and is licensed by the State of California and accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
The project received a 2015 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design Award from San Fernando Valley AIA. Design Awards Chair Richard Gemigniani, AIA, said the jury really liked the project. “Beautiful elevation, simple integration of mass and colors, all centered on the entrance,” he said. “It’s environmentally thoughtful, and beautifully composed. Scale wise, it’s very striking and creates a great presence.”
Olive View-UCLA Medical Center Early Education and Day Care Center, Sylmar, Calif.
Operator: County of Los Angeles and the Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles
Architect: HH Fremer Architects, Santa Monica, Calif.
General contractor/installer: Pub Construction Inc., Diamond Bar, Calif.
Structural engineer: Parker Resnick Structural Engineering, Los Angeles
Fiber-cement panels: American Fiber Cement Corp., Littleton, Colo.
Metal decking: Epic Metals Corp., Rankin, Pa., www.epicmetals.com
Metal wall panels: Alucbond by 3A Composites USA Inc., Davidson, N.C., www.alucobondusa.com
Photos: Eric Staudenmaier
