Cascadia

Cascadia Village Childcare/ Community Center

Affordable Community Environments (ACE) sponsored a community initiative for a childcare/community center in the Covington neighborhood. ACE currently operates 75 adjacent low-income family housing. The
The Cascadia Village concept was born with the proposed 10,000 SF 2-story community center, offering a full range of infant and preschool care with after-school care from K-12. This facility will meet the needs of the entire community, with computer labs, exercise, and multi-purpose areas, including arts and crafts, and a commercial kitchen.

While serving as principal architect at Avalon, Derrick led a series of design workshops in collaboration with a blue-ribbon building committee made up of passionate and experienced childcare professionals from both the public and private education sectors. His facilitation helped guide the vision and priorities for the project through an inclusive, workshop-based process.

The childcare model to inform the design of this facility is Reggio Emilia, which approaches childcare through certain fundamental values about how children learn. The Reggio approach sees a child as a very competent protagonist and initiator who interacts with their environment. It is said that the environment is the third educator, behind parents and teachers.

As an architect, this was truly an exciting time of learning about the science of childcare. The architectural spaces have been conceived with great thought and purpose: natural light, view corridors, indoor/outdoor transitions, art, and performance spaces. We toured the Helen Gordon Center at Portland State, whose director and staff were gracious and generous with their time and experience.

It is a shame that no funding was found to finance this visionary project!