Photos Martin Tessler
Located at the heart of Simon Fraser?s sustainable campus community, the UniverCity Childcare Centre was the seventh building to register for the Living Building Challenge worldwide.
The childcare project was sustainable community building in microcosm, a reminder, from consultation to implementation, of the need to apply best practices at every step. We began with a series of workshops, first with internal stakeholders and then with our governmental and regulatory partners. Then we sat down with the clients, a clutch of three- to five-year-olds, and invited them to submit their best ideas. This was the most fun. In the usual design charrette (that is, one involving adults), you?re often encouraging people to ?think outside the box.? Well, preschoolers have no conception that there ever was a box. They were entirely unrestrained in their creativity. That said, I hope they weren?t too disappointed that we didn?t wind up with a structure of white tree houses on crooked sticks. Blue-sky dreaming notwithstanding, we needed to honour the rules of space and scale, access and safety. We were striving to meet the principles of the Reggio Emilia approach to childcare that had been identified from the outset by our partners at the SFU Childcare Society. Parents and professionals in the Reggio Emilia region of Italy designed this preschool philosophy after the Second World War, in the sobering light of the war?s devastation and in recognition of the importance o...