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Designs for Low-Income Housing--With Child Care in Mind

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<i> Foster is a regular contributor to Valley View</i>

The future of child-care facilities in the San Fernando Valley may be in the hands of 11 young architects from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica.

The students recently gathered at the Warner Center Marriott to showcase their innovative designs for low-income family housing, which may be pooled and eventually built on a 7.8-acre site in Canoga Park.

Integral to their designs are housing and commercial spaces that are tied together, providing a mini-community where residents would live and work--and where child care would be available for their children.

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Instructors within ARCH (Architectural Response to Community Housing), a design studio at the school that promotes low-income housing, have guided the students for 15 weeks as they have drawn and built prototypes of their communities. Also advising the students are L.A. Family Housing Corp., which has developed affordable family housing for low-income working families for six years and the 2-year-old Center for Childhood Creativity, run by Cal State Northridge in Warner Center, which creates and implements innovative child-care solutions.

“I told the students of the importance for homelike environments,” said Dianne Philibosian, project director of the childhood center. “We’ve begun to focus on providing spaces, but not what happens in those spaces. I tried to communicate that,” she said, adding that one particular architect really understood her concepts. Philibosian walked to a scale model of The Village, designed by Robin Morris, a fourth-year student at the architectural institute.

Center of Model

At the center of the model is a child-care center fronted by a park. Fanning out from the facility are commercial zones, including professional offices, restaurants and crafts stores for children. Residential units, as in all the students’ designs, are above retail spaces. Families living in the housing units, which curve in a semi-circle around the child-care center, could easily look out on the park and center should they want to see their children at play.

“I was thinking of the playful aspects of children when I designed the space,” said Morris, 32, who lives in Redondo Beach. A pyramid-shaped, stepped fountain with mini waterfalls is near the child-care center, and water also flows around a circular entrance leading up from the underground parking facility and through the tree-lined park. A bridge spans Canoga Avenue, depositing visitors in the project’s first retail zone, which contains clothing, video and convenience stores.

“Children are people, and one needs to be in touch with them, rather than applying our adult concepts of what a children’s area should look like,” Philibosian said.

“The whole idea behind this development is that you can work, live and play in one tight community,” Morris said.

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“The designs are very unlike L.A.,” said Arnold Stalk, executive director of L.A. Family Housing Corp. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work. It’s an attempt to solve a multitude of problems with one development--affordable housing needs, economic development and child care.

“Land is so scarce and expensive now that you’re going to see more residential and commercial development.”

Stalk said residents could lease commercial space or entire families could be sponsored by a business while their children are cared for nearby. Families would stay in the community for a maximum of five years until they were established financially to move on to their own enterprises.

Stalk, ARCH and others are negotiating to purchase the land from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Should the project be realized, the students will pool their ideas under the supervision of established architects in the area.

“Part of the reason I designed the project was to realize and discover the child within me,” Morris said. “As we grow older, we grow full of logic. The playful aspect gets denied.”

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