819 Elm // Wonderland Child Development Center

With older age comes a deeper appreciation of resilience.  Like Dara Torres, or my high school and army mate Ivo, owner of a fitness salon, or a quotidian symphony conductor.  After the obsessions of grad school older, even not flamboyantly dramatic architecture has been growing on me.  Except where do we draw the line of relevance?  With the human examples the answer is performance.  Competition results and physical resilience are a good metric, as are feats of intellect, like publishing work.  How about buildings, especially those which have fallen into disrepair?

With the rediscovery of traditional downtown environments throughout mid-size urban America by a generation of entrepreneurial younger adults came the boom of remodeling of a century or older buildings.  One of the best original constructed substances to work with is a turn of the XXth century industrial warehouse.  They are all over the Midwest.  They have large span solid timber or concrete structure and thick bearing brick exterior which can be turned into all sorts of things: residences, hotels, offices, breweries, light manufacturing or a combination of those. 

So Old = Good.

Another building type common at the turn of the last century was the tenement housing.  Few of those survive because their structural system is so hard to adapt to contemporary uses.  Above a taller commercially used ground floor the spaces are small and layouts labyrinthine.  The frequent accretions make odd forms with misaligned floors and narrow corridors.  Twentieth century infrastructure improvements often inflame the damages.  But those are old buildings too.  How far should we go to preserve them?

That about sums up my dilemma in picking up this project.  There are nuances in evaluating old buildings and they skew in one direction in this present case which features caved floors, critter and bird infestation, and waterlogged exterior walls.  I believe that we can create a harmonious ensemble without maintaining every single lump of bricks, wood and cast iron.  The job was made a lot easier by the receptive and progressive clients, Heidi and Mike, who insisted on a relentlessly modern approach, and by a community-centric program, which does not prioritize maximum profit above all.  The new addition to Elm and Ninth is thus a 5 story mid-rise, hosts a bakery on the first floor, a two story childcare center, only two residential floors, and a roof garden shared by all inhabitants four fifths of which is the playground for the daycare. 

I feel good about it.