The Foundation for Blind Children needed a new building to raise its profile and improve services
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In 2007, Brad Gildea, senior project manager, SmithGroupJJR, Phoenix, began working with Mark Ashton, CEO of the Phoenix-based Foundation for Blind Children to address pressing needs at the organization. The campus was a mishmash of older buildings that prevented the foundation from serving its clients as well as it could, and presented a low profile in the community.
Ashton outlined three goals for a new building. First, make it an iconic building that will be noticed by the 19,000 motorists passing on North Avenue every day. Second, have the building meet the needs of the blind children who use it and make it fun. Third, make it affordable.
Gildea says, “They wanted to make their presence known. They didn’t want the building to be opulent, but they wanted people to notice them. They wanted something dramatic.”
SmithGroupJJR began working on the program, but it was soon put on hold when the economy collapsed with Phoenix at the epicenter of the housing market freefall. In 2013, the plan was picked up again when Ashton believed he could find the funds to make it work.
An Iconic Roof
The Foundation for Blind Children has been a mainstay in Phoenix since 1952 and is a highly regarded charity. It has had many successes, but perhaps one of the most notable accomplishments by its students was a successful ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2009. In that group was Ashton’s then 13-yearold son, who became the youngest blind climber to summit the peak.
The Corten-clad roof over the main building rises above a multipurpose room and captures the notion of the peaks, both surrounding Phoenix and as a nod to Kilimanjaro. A datum line along the top of the wall separates the curved wall on the North Avenue side from the rising peaks, making the effect more dramatic, and the soft texture of the Corten contrasts pleasingly with the blue sky behind it.
That roof helped meet the goal of raising the foundation’s profile, and it defines the building for what most of the public sees.
But the people who use the center, which includes elementary-school children, staff and parents as well as the larger blind community, required more than just an iconic roofline. To meet their needs, Gildea and his team created an L-shaped building that housed the multipurpose room, foundation offices and a vision store in the portion along North Avenue. “We had to have a series of classrooms,” he says, “which was the primary goal. We used a simple layout with a racetrack hallway and the classrooms were 30-by-30-foot boxes. They’re in an extended bar that goes north.”
As with the peaked forms on the front of the building, the light scoops also represent the sense of mountains and are clad with Corten on both the wall and roof. “We originally wanted the sawtooth over the classrooms,” says Gildea. But designing a building for blind children has some unique needs that include the use of light. “We need to marginalize the shadows and contrast,” he says. “We were worried about having daylight flood into the classrooms because the kids need a level, consistent light.”
Color Selections
The main force of the building is beige, but there are significant color choices in the building that were important. “People can be afraid of color,” says Gildea. “This was a balancing act because the colors are permanent. You don’t want to get too trendy.”
The colored aluminum panels above windows break up the long stretch of beige. “We went through a number of color conversations. Certain colors register differently. We chose a pastel color palette after doing some research on colors that were helpful to the blind.” The foundation’s website picked up the same colors for its palette and they’re now part of the marketing effort for the foundation.
Open Space
In contrast to the bright color panels below the datum line and the earth-colored Corten roof above it, the gray aluminum canopy, which forms the main substance of the datum line, creates a clear differentiator. The canopy is cantilevered along the walkway on the inside of the l-shaped building so there are no posts to create obstacles.
At the entrance to the building, the canopy is also cantilevered, except for two necessary columns along the end of a walkway. It also features a gull-winged like rise at the front corner. This gives a nice definition to the canopy and demarks the entry for the building.
As you come to the building entrance, you encounter a green-colored, flush metal wall that begins on the exterior of the building and penetrates into the lobby. As with the roof, this also represents a significant school accomplishment, when a group of students successfully swam the 1.5 miles to Alcatraz Island.
“We originally were going to make the wall out of Corten,” Gildea says, “but the kids would be touching it and getting dirty. You immediate think blind people would want a lot of texture, and we brought some textured gypsum wall samples to a meeting. But they don’t want sensory overload, so from that standpoint, it was a reversal of the process of what we thought would be great.”
The kids trail their hands along the walls. For the metal wall in the lobby, that meant the panels had to be perfectly flush with no gaps. Any gaps would provide a place for a small finger to catch. “We had to do special fittings to get it tight,” Gildea says.
Photos: Liam Frederick
Foundation for Blind Children, Phoenix
Building owner: Foundation for Blind Children
Project size: 37,000 square feet
Completion date: August 2015
Architect: SmithGroupJJR, Phoenix
General contractor: Haydon Building Corp., Phoenix
Curtainwall installer: Sierra Glass, Phoenix
Metal panel fabricator and installer: True Metal Solutions, Phoenix, www.truemetalsolutions.com
Aluminum canopy fabricator and installer: Castle Steel Inc., Phoenix, www.castlesteelinc.com
Curtainwall: Arcadia Inc., Vernon, Calif., www.arcadiainc.com