Design Guides Students at Goodwin College Early Childhood Magnet School

EAST HARTFORD, Conn. — Svigals + Partners, based in New Haven, Conn., recently celebrated the opening of the new Goodwin College Early Childhood Magnet School in September. The school was created for students in Goodwin College’s growing child study and early childhood education programs to use as a laboratory space, according to Dean Alan Kramer.
The new school is a 34,000-square-foot structure housing young PK-K students. Fusco, based in New Haven, was the general contractor for the project.
The overall goal of the project was to develop a space based on the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy for early childhood education. The building’s architecture is focused on promoting and enhancing the various facets of the model, with a special emphasis on the interplay of aesthetically pleasing spaces and the beauty of the natural world. Using locally sourced landscaping materials and native local plants helped the design team reach this goal.
The building itself was designed around a central gathering space, the Atelier. Four classroom pods branch off from the Atelier. Several themes link the four pods together. Each pod is like a contained village, with a colorful Connecticut leaf theme — Maple, Oak Beech or Tulip — distinguishing each one. “In the Atelier all of the colors of the four pods are represented so the kids can follow the color paths of blue, green, yellow and orange or the leaves to their village,” said Barry Svigals, managing partner at Svigals + Partners.
When commenting on the success of the project, Svigals said that the pre-design programming session was especially useful. “The successful implementation of this pre-design approach broke down barriers and created a common language for everyone who would be involved in the project,” he said. “In this case, the collaborative process included a group dance exercise with the client, engineers and other team members.”
The group also employed the Reggio Emilia philosophy during the design phase: “Images were scattered all over the floor and each person picked up one that moved them in some way. They went around the circle and described their feelings related to the pictures — getting each person in touch with themselves physically, emotionally and intellectually,” Svigas said.
In terms of setbacks, Svigas mentioned the site itself was a challenge. He explained that there was no free space anywhere on the site, which meant that the project team had to work to clear a space for the new building. “The site was challenging because of the adjacencies to the highway and the existing Willowbrook School. Sound and views [posed another difficulty] because of [the] nearby highway,” he said.
The team managed to circumvent these issues with relative ease. Glazing was installed on the side of the building to help limit the noise coming off the highway, and the school’s presence on the side of the road helps create a calming presence as drivers pass by, according to Svigas.
Construction on the project lasted from July 2012 until August 2013. The school was designed to meet the LEED Silver standard, and complies with the Connecticut High Performance School guidelines.

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Yale Attracts Researchers with New Innovative Labs

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Yale University continues to set standards when it comes to scientific research, and one way it plans on recruiting top scientists is with its new W-B 24 scientific research facility at the university’s growing West Campus Integrated Science & Technology Center (W-ISTC).

The new flexible spaces, which will house the Nanobiology Institute and its study of Cell Biology and Biophysics, provide a customizable research atmosphere, as the school continues to draw new researchers and their practices.

The design architect on the project was New Haven-based Svigals + Partners. Adapted within the lab and office spaces of a 136-acre former Bayer Pharmaceutical complex — a “transformative” move that added 460,000 square feet of laboratory space — the new research center has been designed so that the individual labs can support a variety of biology and engineering studies and include features such as microscopy suites, DNA sequencers and cell culture.

“The biggest challenge on the project was balancing what to keep generic and what to customize. Yale wants us to be flexible so that they can recruit people, but we wanted to have an infrastructure in place to minimize customization after and were able to guide Yale to figure out what needed to be already in place,” said Bob Skolozdra, AIA, LEED AP, and partner with Svigals + Partners.

The generic solutions they created include lab systems with flexible casework; plug-and-play mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems; rolling cabinets; and other modular, pre-engineered solutions.

The architecture firm also strategically planned the project so it did not require an entire gut renovation. Instead, Skolozdra said they reused a lot of the materials, reducing the cost by as much as 50 percent. For example, they saved 75 percent of the flooring by only replacing areas that needed it and by simply cleaning and polishing the others. The existing fixed lab benches were refurbished and fitted with electrostatic painting, as well as with new wood shelves and wood-faced rolling cabinets.

Although Yale decided not to pay the money to go for certification, the new facility was designed to meet LEED Gold standards. One way Svigals + Partners did this is by replacing just the lights instead of the ceilings to be more energy efficient. Plus, the design incorporates lots of daylighting, with glass-walled offices and “zones outside the lab where people could go, meet and still watch the researchers inside the lab through translucent walls,” Skolozdra said.

In addition to renovating the space and bringing in more sunlight, Svigals + Partners built the lab equipment on a 10-foot module, removing outmoded services and furnishings. This is a common approach for research institutes in which space allocation is based on funding criteria.

Construction began on Nov. 29, 2011 and was completed on July 9, 2012. The total project consists of two floors of about 20,000 square feet each. As Yale continues to recruit more research scientists, Svigals + Partners is undertaking the required customization and redesign to accommodate the necessary technologies. Once completed, the first project, located at grade level, will accommodate eight principal investigators (PIs) that will run research units of about 10 to 12 people each. The second part will hold two more institutes of about 10,000 square feet each, with the capacity of 9 PIs and their teams.

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Design Guides Students at Goodwin College Early Childhood Magnet School

Yale Attracts Researchers with New Innovative Labs