Project Walk-Through

Anchor Center for Blind Children

Denver, Colorado

Davis Partnership Architects | Denver, Colorado

BY DEBORAH PADDISON

Color and contrast are integral to the design. In the Motor Room, vertical punctures of tinted glass and sunlight invite children to play within child-sized cubbies. Photograph by Ron Pollard.

Looking at the new Anchor Center for Blind Children, one can't help but be impressed with its design. Yet perhaps its true beauty is revealed only when the eyes are closed.

Located in Denver, Colorado's Stapleton neighborhood, the Anchor Center is an early childhood development center for children ranging from infancy through age five who are blind or have vision impairments. The staff of vision specialists, therapists and teachers works with the children on preschool education, mobility and orientation, and life skills. The goal is to promote independence and prepare the children for mainstream kindergarten.

So how do you design an educational center for children who can't rely on their vision to learn? That was the challenge for Davis Partnership Architects of Denver.

"The poetry of this building comes from designing an environment where you enrich the experience by embracing as many senses as possible," says Brit Probst, AIA, partner in charge of the project. The 15,600-square-foot Julie McAndrews Mork building (named for a longtime supporter) and surrounding two-acre campus incorporate learning experiences at every turn, through light, sound, touch, smell — and even taste.

The Anchor Center for Blind Children incorporates sensory cues inside and out to help visually impaired children engage with and learn about the world around them. In the one-story building, three classroom pods, connected by a central circulation spine, are flooded in diffused light through a series of filtered clerestory windows just below the angled roofline. Photograph by Ron Pollard.

The process began when the design team, including Probst; Maria Cole, AIA, the lead architect on the project (who has since left Davis); and landscape architect Eric Crotty, ASLA, made a site visit to the Center's previous, much smaller locale. That included wearing goggles designed to mimic various sight impairments so the team could personally experience how the children interact with their surroundings.

"The 'aha moment' was their realization that the project was all about light, not darkness," says Alice Applebaum, executive director of the Anchor Center. "Because the children have varying degrees of vision impairment, some can distinguish light and dark, as well as colors. So contrast and color play an important role in the design."

Situated in a primarily residential area, the building needed to conform to the surrounding neighborhood's scale. In plan, the building is a succession of three "pods" connected by a linear hallway. The pods — "Blue," "Yellow" and "Red" — play off the themes of mind, body and spirit and house the various classrooms and activity spaces, as well as spaces for staff, teachers and parents.

A teacher assists a child with motor skills development in the Motor Room. Here, as in other classrooms, varied flooring materials, ceiling heights and acoustical treatments define spatial volumes and create an interior architecture that is intentionally clean, sound-focused and free of obstructions. Photograph by Nic Lehoux.

"The pod design helped to scale the building and made it feel more comfortable with the single-family residences across the street, and then the mind/body/spirit theme became the organizing element for the interior spaces," says Probst.

Sound, touch and light cues help children navigate the Grand Hallway. At the entrance to each pod, hardwood flooring gives way to tile, so children not only feel the texture change, but hear the sound change as their canes and footsteps resonate on the different surfaces. Acoustic baffles are also strategically suspended from the ceiling.

"We tried to create acoustic environments so that by tapping a cane or clicking their tongue, the children could orient themselves through echolocation," says Probst.

Children make their way along the Braille Trail by following its inset Braille alphabet. Photograph by Ron Pollard.

High ceilings and skylights bring in light, and clerestory lights in the hallway's pod entry zones are correspondingly tinted blue, yellow and red. Along the side wall, a Trail Rail and Light Walk provide additional wayfinding.

Through specific wall placements and flooring selections — carpet, rubber and hard-surface materials — all the classrooms are acoustically engineered to minimize noise and give directional sound cues. Benjamin's Niche, a classroom for children with both vision and hearing loss, is the only one with a wood floor — it resonates, allowing the children to "feel" the sound.

But the sensory cues begin even before students arrive, Crotty notes. Cars entering the property cross over a series of rumble strips, for a kind of auditory "welcome." Approaching the building's entrance, cane and wheelchair users will notice that the scoring marks in the pavement draw closer together, indicating proximity to the front door.

In the Grand Hallway, a toddler-level Trail Rail recessed into the corridor wall and a Light Walk in the floor assist children with orientation and navigation. Photograph by Ron Pollard.

The Sensory Garden, located to the right of the entrance, is a feast for the senses. It features meandering pathways, a dry streambed with a small bridge, varying surface textures, bench seating, and native plantings selected for their texture, scent and color. "It's fairly sturdy stuff, so the kids can touch it and pull on it," Crotty says. An interactive fountain feature allows children to rearrange its stones, feeling their smoothness and changing the sound of the falling water. A slatted cedar fence surrounding the garden offers another tactile experience, with different-size pickets that play with light and shadow and change pitch when canes are run across them.

Sculpture also was commissioned for the garden. The winning artist, Sarah Grant Raymond of Boulder, created three interactive, kid-size bronze sculptures modeled after actual Anchor Center students. All elements on the sculptures, from a book with a readable Braille surface to the differently shaped buttons on a girl's blouse, are meant to encourage exploration through touch.

Crotty bermed a grassy hill that the children can roll down and designed a gazebo-style tree house with a small sandbox at the bottom. "I wanted the kids to be able to experience those aspects of childhood that are memorable to many of us, in a setting where they wouldn't be afraid to move or be unsure of where they could go," Crotty says.

At the entrance, pavement scoring draws wheelchair users toward the front door, and a subtle Braille-like motif enlivens the exterior brickwork. The gate at right opens into the Sensory Garden. Photograph by Nic Lehoux.

On the oval Braille Trail, children can walk or ride tricycles guided by large brass markers inlaid into the paving that spell out the Braille alphabet and the numbers 0 through 9. Another area, Cane Walk Lane, presents children with different paving surfaces, along with areas that are open and curbed, so they can practice cane skills.

Kid-size, wheelchair-accessible picnic tables, a greenhouse and a garden round out the landscape. This year, the kids grew a "pizza garden" and made their own salsa from tomatoes they harvested — embracing the final sense, taste.

In the end, the building and the landscape come together to create one school that engages children and helps them "see" in many different ways.

The Center has earned much acclaim since it opened last fall. "It has exceeded every expectation," Applebaum says. "They took what our staff knows about how young children with vision impairments learn and translated it into not just a building, but functional art."

Architectural design and landscape architecture: Davis Partnership Architects, 2301 Blake St., Suite 100, Denver, CO 80205; (303) 861-8555 or www.davispartner.com.

Structural engineering: Don Ihlenfeldt, P.E., Steamboat Springs, CO; dihlen@springsips.com.

Mechanical/electrical engineering: Shaffer Baucom Engineering & Consulting, 7333 W. Jefferson Ave., Suite 230, Lakewood, CO 80235; (303) 986-8200 or www.sbengr.com.

Acoustic consulting: Shen Milsom Wilke, 1822 Blake St., Suite 2A, Denver, CO 80202; (720) 482-0770 or www.smwinc.com.

Garden benches: Lakeside by Landscape Forms, www.landscapeforms.com.

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