Innovative After-School Programs

by Marcy Marro | October 1, 2021 12:00 am

While looking for a centralized facility to hold concerts and community events, HOLA negotiated the use of a little-used northeast corner of Lafayette Park, one of the city’s oldest parks, with the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

Designed by Berliner Architects[1], Los Angeles, the new 25,000-square-foot Arts and Recreation Center (ARC) acts as a clubhouse for orchestral and choral practice and STEAM after-school activities. The building features nine dedicated music rooms, 12 club rooms, three office areas, two lounges, and a founders room. Additionally, there is a 2,185-square-foot performance pavilion on the ground floor that opens up to the park and a grassy hillock that provides shaded seating for concerts.

Known as the Clubhouse, ARC is designed to spark the imaginations of many young aspiring musicians. Constructed mainly from 46 recycled shipping containers fabricated by SG Blocks[2], New York City, the structure is nestled into a natural hillside, which minimizes the mass of the building and displacement of existing palm trees, while preserving usable park space. According to Richard Berliner, AIA, LEED AP, ALEP, principal at Berliner Architects, the shipping containers allowed the foundations to be built in a way that minimized root damage and the containers were craned onto the foundations without having an impact on trees.

“The shipping containers were first considered because of the environmental advantages of reusing shipping containers and efficiency of the construction system,” Berliner explains. “Designing a sustainable building is a very high priority of the design team.”

The shipping containers have an integral perimeter frame at the top, bottom and long sides and are designed to allow fully loaded containers be stacked up to 8 feet high. To join containers together, the corrugated steel walls could be removed, forming larger rooms such as for the large performance space on the ground floor and the larger classrooms. This flexibility allows the rooms to be reconfigured by filling in existing openings or removing large portions of corrugated steel wall to combine spaces. Stacking the shipping containers three stories high allows for a tight, efficient footprint, Berliner says, while minimizing the impact on the adjacent trees.

A 54-foot-wide by 14-foot-high hangar door from Schweiss Doors[3], Hector, Minn., is nicknamed “Big Door,” and opens up to a large performance pavilion onto the park. The Big Door is decorated with a dynamic, energetic pattern of overlapping circles in HOLA’s blue and orange brand colors. The design graces the surface of the Big Door as well as the surrounding elevations of the building, along with compatible graphics of silhouetted figures that express the optimism and excitement generated within the building. The pattern of circles also extends to the interior, where it forms HOLA’s donor board. The bright white of the containers also corresponds to the interiors, which are punctuated by the cheerful color pattern in the furniture and signage.

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/innovative-after-school-programs/

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