The eyes, not the ears, are the tools we typically use to judge whether buildings are beautiful. But at a bright new day care center across South State Street from the glowering high rises of the Robert Taylor Homes, it is sounds, as much as sights, that make the most powerful impression.
Listen to young children pushing tiny tricycle pedals, or swooshing down a slide, or singing “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” Listen to the laughter that pours from a protected courtyard and spreads to the light-filled corridors that surround it. And listen to the confidence in the voice of a mother who brings her 3- and 4-year-old boys to this day care center, so near a violent housing project.
“I don’t have to worry about that,” says Schenea Hardy, 21, who lives on Chicago’s South Side. “I have peace of mind.”
Anywhere else, all this would be taken for granted. But in the area around the Taylor Homes, where the crack of gunfire is almost commonplace, the sounds of normalcy are sounds worth celebrating. Inside this building, which was designed by the noted Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, the only hint of the dangerous world outside is the wail of a police siren piercing the quiet of a spring afternoon.
Already serving as a national model — the actress Jane Fonda has visited the day care center and signaled her intention to open a comparable facility in Atlanta — the $4 million building at 5044 S. Wabash Ave. is to be dedicated Thursday. It speaks to the essential role that design can play in giving the poorest kids a chance to lead normal lives. Yet it also sends a message to millions of American children who come from much wealthier families, but who still get day care in dark church basements or in confining office buildings.
That message has been best articulated by Irving Harris, the former board chairman of the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a not-for-profit group that strives to improve the well-being of children and adolescents, particularly those in inner cities.
“This,” Harris says, speaking of the day care center, which his group brought into being with help from Head Start, the State of Illinois, the Chicago Public Schools, and private donors, “lets kids know how much we value them.”
Called the Educare Center and offering full-day care for up to 158 kids 6 weeks to 5 years old, the building replaces an Ounce of Prevention day care center located on the second floor of a Robert Taylor high-rise at 4848 S. State St. To reach that facility, moms, dads, infants and toddlers had to run the gantlet of a stairwell controlled by drug dealers. There was no suitable outdoor play space — playgrounds had broken equipment and were littered with broken glass. In any event, there was little reason to go outside: With rival gangs fighting it out, shots were fired with alarming frequency.
“The children would drop. They knew the drill,” says Brenda Dobbins-Noel, the director of child and family support services for the Ounce of Prevention Fund.
They are flowering, not dropping, at the new building. The 69-year-old Tigerman, who in the 1960s led an architects’ group that sharply criticized the practice of putting public housing families in high-rise buildings like those at Taylor, has created an island of serenity in a sea of chaos.
Sandwiched between Farren Elementary School on the south and DuSable High School on the north, the Educare Center recalls a college quadrangle: Structures arranged in a square that wrap around a sheltered courtyard. Instead of lordly Oxford dons striding to their classes, this open space is filled with African-American kids who do what children do: squeal, sing and get into spats with each other. Ringing the courtyard, which has a rubbery floor that prevents scrapes and cuts, is a light-filled hallway, which is itself circumscribed by classrooms, as well as offices, conference rooms, a lobby and a kitchen.
The arrangement represents a new wrinkle. In most day care centers, classrooms are on both sides of a hallway and the play space is on the outside of the building — exactly where it shouldn’t be in neighborhoods plagued by drive-by shootings.
But here, the classrooms are on just one side of the corridor, allowing light to filter in from the inner courtyard. Because it results in a bigger perimeter, this feature drives up the cost of the building, to $4 million from $3.25 million, Tigerman acknowledges. But in the inner city, the payoff is priceless: a playground that provides all sorts of protection, not only from violent outsiders, but from the threat of kids drifting off and getting lost.
“We don’t have to worry about anything coming in or anybody going out,” says one teacher, Shantonia Appling.
That part of the design is utterly rational, but there’s also some postmodern whimsy at play here, which, coming from Tigerman, is no surprise. His previous buildings include a parking garage at 60 E. Lake St. where the facade resembles the grille of a Rolls-Royce and an animal shelter at 157 W. Grand Ave. where the front evokes the face of a droopy-eared dog.
The same shtick defines the Educare Center. The classrooms for kids between 6 weeks and 3 years of age suggest houses, with pointed roofs and fake chimneys. The classrooms for children age 3 to 5 echo school houses, their fronts punctuated by non-working clocks whose hands are set at 3, 4 and 5 o’clock. That move is meant to symbolize the ages of the children and to help them identify — and identity with — their classrooms. The synthetic stucco exterior walls of all the classrooms are painted in bright pastels–yellow, pink, blue and green — as if someone had colored them with crayons.
Judged strictly by its looks, the Educare Center can be described as Disneyesque, cartoonish. It looks as if it parachuted into the South Side from Orlando. But talk to the people who use the Educare Center and you hear another story: The area around the Robert Taylor Homes could use a little of the fun-filled, fantasy architecture of Walt Disney World’s Main Street, U.S.A. For those who live in the public housing, this place looks like home.
“When [parents] walk in here, it’s like they’re somewhere else,” says teacher Sheila Mahon.
Adds Hardy, the mother who brings her two children to the school: “It looks like a little village.”
Whether or not one approves of the Educare Center as a work of architecture, it is hard to dispute that Tigerman has deftly maintained a sense of innocence in a building that, above all, had to be shielded from its surroundings.
With its peaked roof and metal-clad columns, the entry pavilion — found near the corner of East 51st Street and South Wabash — evokes a miniature Greek temple. “Welcome,” it says, not “go away.” But there’s toughness here; it’s simply well-masked.
A layer of perforated aluminum outside the front door’s window guards the main lobby from bullets. Neatly turning armor into decoration — and thus making it seem less menacing — Tigerman uses the same aluminum as the background material for a sign marking the entrance to the building. In a similar vein, windows that face outward to the street are located behind fences that have a double layer of mesh, but are playfully painted. In the lobby, there are no windows on the walls; light comes from above — through an eight-sided skylight.
“The idea,” Tigerman says, “is to have a benign building that protects kids.”
The lobby sets a kid-friendly tone that is in evidence throughout the building. Wood chairs are low-slung, making it easy for a child to see eye to eye with adults — and not feel intimidated. In the hallways and the building’s two gyms, located in the courtyard, Tigerman has lined the lower parts of the walls with the same gray and white tiles that are on the floor. That way, children can run their hands along the walls, as they are wont to do, yet the walls easily can be cleaned. Classrooms are bright, furnished with warm wood, and perfectly scaled to the kids. So are bathrooms — a key feature for the age group undergoing toilet training.
“A lot of kids are scared of the toilet. If it’s their size, they’re not scared,” Appling says.
The need for internal supervision is also sensitively handled. Because the corners of the square-shaped day care center house teacher offices and conference rooms, adults in these areas have straight-shot views down the corridors. But the hallways are not Stalag-like. Tigerman has placed wood storage closets in them and, on the same side as the closets, built-in seats where kids and their teachers can have an intimate, one-on-one talk. He did it, he says, because he stuttered as a child and frequently needed to talk privately with his teacher in the hall.
It’s a good stroke, making the halls not just passageways but places that pulse with activity. Still, there are faults, inside and out.
The color coding of the floor tiles isn’t different enough from corridor to corridor. As a result, because each section of the building is virtually identical, it’s easy for a visitor to get disoriented. In the outdoor play space, there are no trees or shrubs, so the playground has a harsh look. Still, these are quibbles when you compare the Educare Center with the atmosphere at the Robert Taylor Homes.
Standing in the courtyard, the high-rises across the street are visible but seem a world away. One feels sheltered, protected, upbeat. Kids ride trikes and tip their wooden rockers. And there are sounds to savor: The children singing and the whisper of warm breezes running through the trees across Wabash Avenue.
“This kind of gives the kids a chance to feel more free,” Appling says.
That the Educare Center does, which is why it represents such a welcome departure — not only from typical day care centers, but also from the self-indulgent form-making of so much of today’s architecture. With the intent of evoking the chaotic quality of modern life, many designers are shaping buildings that look like they just went through an earthquake; in contrast, Tigerman isn’t just commenting on contemporary problems; he’s helping to solve them.
While his building is more a social success than an aesthetic one, it nevertheless provides a humanistic model for the pressing national problem of improving day care, not only for kids in the inner city but for their counterparts in edge city suburbs and elsewhere. Here, the social promise of architecture can be seen in the faces of the children and in their sounds of joy.
