Click image to enhance

Dupont School for the Disabled

This building’s primary role serves as a learning space for children with various physical and mental disabilities. It’s secondary roles function as an ESL night school for adults, a shipping postal store, and an afterschool care service for children. The building site is located in the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C., and it is an infill slot building situated between two apartment buildings. The South sun hits the building at the end opposite of the street facing facade, the side that opens to a parking lot shared by surrounding buildings.

The structural system is a combination of CLT, steel columns, and concrete. The expressed facade material is a corrugated matte metal paneling system. The facade language of the adjacent buildings on the street is maintained through the pattern of the punched out windows. As an infill project the building’s relationship to it’s neighboors on this street facing facade is an important factor.

The main area of focus in this design is providing an ease of circulation for wheelchair users combined with the use of subtractions at various scales to provide places for different uses. The interior materiality is almost entirely wood that gets illuminated by warm lights hidden along reveals where planes meet.

There is one main hallway that is straight; this ensures no awkward tight turns for those in wheelchairs. Since more than half of the buildings occupants use wheelchairs two elevators are included with a generous waiting area. This helps manage the flow of circulation when students arrive to go to class, and when they depart at the end of the day.

Each classroom contains two tables that fold out of the walls, so as to not clutter the space when not in use, and thus to better allow for wheelchair mobility. Storage, chairs, a sink, and a water fountain are also recessed into the walls so as to not take up classroom floor space. The classrooms are placed on either ends of the building, as these are the facades that receive natural light, and the spaces which people spend the most time in while they are in the building.