Designing to Foster Change

By Beth Herman

Sixty years ago, in a world where children were chastised for chewing gum and staying after school was tantamount to the end of the world, the concept of an entity like D.C.’s Children’s Law Center (CLC) would have been as remote an idea as bottled water.

With festering issues of abuse, neglect, education, health care, domestic violence and mental health defining young people in the 21^st century, and successfully navigating a complex and evolving child welfare system can mean the difference between a life of value and one of inconsequence, the Children’s Law Center, at 616 H Street, NW, stepped up to the plate some 14 years ago and has since become a significant arbiter of change in the foster care system.

Up Where We Belong

In 2006, faced with substandard office space, monochromatic colors and deteriorating furniture and facilities in their previous home at 15^th and I Streets (the organization had taken over an old law office 10 years earlier without modification or redesign), the CLC sought the advice of OTJ Architects while anticipating a move. In short, CLC wished to create a space that would both facilitate their mission and provide a source of encouragement and delight for the many adults and children who frequented the Center.

Working with OTJ partner Roger Sola-Sole, project architect Lisa Winkler and her team set about fulfilling the task of designing what the firm called a “child-centric” environment, yet one which corresponded to critical meetings and conferences, all within a highly restrictive $810,650 budget.

“They wanted a happier, lighter space, and they actually share offices,” Winkler said, relative to the 64-member move-in staff when the Center opened in 2007. “They really like to work in pairs,” she added, which they now do in 180 s.f. spaces, with some offices supporting even three employees. Single offices, at 120 s.f., also accommodate staff, with senior level employees in larger spaces and 13 workstations available for investigators should they choose to utilize them, according to Winkler.

With 16,600 s.f. on the third and part of the fourth floors of the building, the architects focused the tight budget on three main areas: the reception area on the third floor, the third floor elevator lobby and the children’s area. CLC had its own ideas about the use of primary colors, with OTJ introducing child-oriented materials into the mix. “The main color for their logo is blue,” Winkler explained, “so we wanted to focus on that blue and also brought in a bright red.” The boldness of the colors necessitated a fairly neutral carpet in a warm palette, so the architects chose a pale gold for the public spaces and a carpet tile that was both gold and blue for the Center’s lunch room/lounge area.

If I Had a Hammer

At the end of a hallway, silhouettes of children on red walls engaged in various activities keep that area playful, with Winkler explaining that in a nod to budgetary constraints, she’d identified the images online and recruited OTJ colleagues, and some Center staff, to paint them one weekend. “We had a paint day,” she recalled. “I went over and outlined them in a Sharpie marker the day before, then the next day some of us went over and painted them in black. It was a real combined effort.”

In an effort to create something structure-wise using children’s objects, Winkler said items such as Legos were bandied about, with the ultimate design decision focusing on marbles. To that end, four or five 8-foot tall divider windows filled with 3 feet of marbles (child height) punctuate the space, with the marbles – 350 pounds in all – resourcefully obtained from a Chinese toy trader’s website. A 17 x 13-foot playroom, where an entire corner is a floor-to-ceiling blackboard and a slide with portholes accommodates both children and adults, abuts a 12 x 12-foot teen center replete with computers and TV.

When You Wish Upon a Star

“In their old offices, it was all grey, but they tried to decorate and keep it fun,” Winkler also explained, adding that employees had name plaques outside their doors where they’d customized them. In the new space, the team affixed magnetic whiteboards to each office door for staff to personalize. A long mural hallway, in which the Center wanted a D.C.-focused design, portrays row houses and stick figure children to reflect the organization’s graphics. The children in the mural hold up blank whiteboard spaces to display the hundreds of thank you letters and artwork the Center receives each year. And in a tradition replicated from the Center’s former offices, the architects posted childhood photos of current Center staff in a space en route from the children’s play area, whereby young visitors can take their chances identifying exactly who’s now who.

On the fourth floor, an adult conference room which Winkler concedes is a bright primary blue, has an electric garage door at one end to open up to a lounge seating area across the hall, accommodating the entire staff when necessary. Winkler said the decision to incorporate a garage door was budget-based, and there also wasn’t space to stack a traditional operable partition.

Receiving a lot of donations in the form of clothing and toys, Winkler said the former office configuration left no space and provided no system to organize these items. Again with economics in mind, she chose an IKEA system and built a 180 s.f. room full of shelving, right off the play area.

“We did a lot with a little bit of money,” Winkler said. “We focused on important areas, but still made the rest of the space warm and inviting.”

Overall, the architects achieved a space that clearly articulates CLC’s mission and vision while providing its youngest visitors, many of whom have come from a world unimaginable to the rest of us, an opportunity to focus on being children.

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Designing to Parallel an Ocean of Achievement

By Beth Herman

For an organization rooted in sustaining the seas, relocating to a sustainable space that also trumpeted its mission, by virtue of design, was a lesson in synchronicity for global ocean conservation nonprofit Oceana, 1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, and OTJ Architects.

Jettisoning its former traditional square block building with weighty, dark interior finishes on the edge of Georgetown, Oceana opted for space in a DuPont Circle structure, completed in 1930, from a time when buildings were largely illuminated by natural light and built to utilize it. Also paramount to the organization was to have proximity to a place such as DuPont Circle (it is steps from Metro) so that employee commuting would be streamlined. Relocation, in fact, was the first step in a renovation process shepherded by OTJ project manager Lida Lewis whose design challenge was to make the 15,000 s.f. space reflect Oceana’s – with offices throughout North, Central and South America and Europe – worldwide outreach and goals. In short, both the organization and the walls that contained it needed to share an inspired identity.

“When we got in (to the new floor), it was divided into five tenant spaces that had to be completely cleared out,” Lewis said, noting it was one of those floors that had been “added to and subtracted from so many times.” With 70 employees, OTJ’s goal was to create much more of a contemporary environment where older, individual offices were largely dissolved in favor of expansive public work spaces. “Often that’s a tricky transition for a lot of groups,” Lewis observed, recalling that in the client’s previous building, much more of the staff had had private offices. In a nod to green practices - though strictly for time purposes Oceana had decided not to pursue LEED certification - low-VOC materials such as sustainably-dyed broadloom carpeting which is 100 percent recyclable were used throughout, and the organization’s older furniture was reused in the few private offices, and OTJ offered incentive for the new employee balance by providing brand new furniture for staff who went into the more public workspaces.

Where lighting was concerned, OTJ harnessed natural light for 90 percent of the floorplate. Occupancy sensors, fluorescent fixtures and some LED lighting were also used, and “mesooptic technology” which allows light fixtures to adhere closely to the ceiling, with light spreading widely across the ceiling plane, resulted in a decrease in the number of fixtures necessary. It also afforded a gentle light below, according to Lewis, which precludes glare on computer screens.

Who Let the Fish Out

While Lewis concedes that OTJ had considered strategic use of fish tanks in the client’s office environment, the team quickly learned that Oceana’s philosophy eschews fish in captivity. As such, the design challenge was to tell the organization’s story with visuals that did not involve compromising life forms. In place of tanks, the use of elements such as light boxes and layers of curved plexiglass with translucent printed film of sea images (fish; a diver; sea grass) serve to illuminate their work, with Oceana’s internal graphics department participating in this aspect of the design. The wall behind the reception area, which uses multiple glass panes, is actually different layers of glass and glass film emblematic of the movement and transparencies of the waves on Oceana’s printed materials. A dolphin, part of their logo, appears to be jumping through these waves on the wall, and Philips Color Kinetics’ LED lighting at the top of the wall cycles through colors - which can be restricted and changed by a dial next to the reception desk – so that like the ocean, the display is not static.

In order to express and perpetuate Oceana’s evolving mission and accomplishments to staff and visitors, graphic displays on “pucks” or “stand-offs” – one-inch in diameter square rods an inch tall that support plexiglass, sandwiched together, in which to display photographs, articles, awards and the like– punctuate the space. The major focal point for this “living story” is the seating lobby adjacent to the reception area, and also throughout the public corridor which is the Connecticut Avenue façade. According to Lewis, for the most part these displays are also not static and can be changed and updated as the organization embarks on its many undertakings and achieves its many goals. “It keeps things fresh,” she affirmed.

In tandem with the current trend for organizations to sublease internal space until they are large enough and ready to utilize it themselves, and with the space itself shaped like a giant letter “A” (the upper left corner is executive suites), OTJ Architects built out these suites in the same colors - Caribbean hues - and with the same finishes as Oceana’s occupied space. In this respect, when the time comes, transitioning to it will be less about extensive additional renovation and more about simply where to place a cherished family snapshot or two.

“Clients don’t like cookie-cutter solutions,” Lewis said in reference to Oceana’s practical, sustainable though highly inventive use of its new space. “We asked the question, ‘What is it about your organization that makes it a good place to work?’, and together came up with something that really works with their identity.”

Photo credit: Chris Spielmann

www.spielmannstudio.com

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