GUILFORD CENTER

FOR CHILDREN

The Guilford Center for Children, a daycare facility for 60 pre-Kindergarten children in the center of Guilford, Connecticut. The project site lies within the town’s Historic District and contains two abandoned antique barns, a vestige of a former farm that occupied adjacent lands and a reminder of Guilford’s agrarian history. After a careful survey of the barns’ structural condition and suitability for the proposed use, the design team advised the clients to take advantage of the existing architecture and landscape to create a wonderful new home for their program. Our plan proposes to salvage the barn frames and enclosure, placing four “home bases” (classrooms) on the ground floor of the larger building with an accessible gross motor play area and “art studio” on the second floor above them. Large skylights flood the middle classrooms with light that supplements the large windows to the east and creates great translucent playscapes where they penetrate the spaces gross motor room .Occupying two floors of the smaller barn to the west, the administration, teacher and parent resource rooms overlook a double-height breakfast and lunch room for the children. Parking, service and entry are clearly separated from the spaces occupied by the children, making the Center for Children a secure but highly functional building.

By carefully protecting and reusing the existing barns, we have reduced the construction costs of the new facility, strengthened community relations with residents concerned with the adaptation of a familiar and historically significant site, and reinforced the principles of environmental sustainability that has guided our choices of materials and mechanical and structural systems for the project. In all the large communal spaces of the building, the existing character of the barns will be on full display, providing the children and their parents with a ready link to Guilford’s past and to the particular historic qualities that so enrich a child’s experiences.”