Interior / photo by Rosemary Tufankjian, courtesy of Stanmar Inc.
by Oliver Snider
Too many youth centers have the same set of problems: Too little program space, poorly configured program space, noncompliance with standards for accessibility or safety. And most of their problems have the same root cause, which in the case of the Nantucket Boys & Girls Club can be summed up with two numbers: 1960 and 80. Respectively, that’s the year the club was built, and the number of members it then served.
These days, the Nantucket club has more than 700 members — 65% of the island’s registered public school children in grades 1 through 8, and 50% of kids in the two local private schools. The original building, up through the end of 2013, was largely as it had been for 50 years, with the exception of a small expansion of its games room in the 1990s.
Exterior / photo by Runaway Bride Nantucket, courtesy of Stanmar Inc.
This summer, however, the Boys & Girls Club completed a long-awaited 20,000sf expansion. Its dangerous gymnasium — with walls just a few feet beyond the basketball court’s side- and baselines — was demolished, and a new fully compliant two-court gym took its place, along with expanded facilities for the club’s myriad after-school and summer programs. In a town and county of 10,300 residents that expands to 50,000 during the summer months, including summer residents, tourists and attendant service-industry workers, the updated Boys & Girls Club can now broaden its offerings to young people year-round.
Boys & Girls Clubs most often operate as an adjunct youth program; of the 4,074 chartered Club facilities in the United States, the largest single group of like facilities comprises clubs located within schools, of which there are 1,400 nationally. According to Atlanta-based Boys & Girls Clubs of America, among the other larger groups are the 400 BGCA-affiliated youth centers on U.S. military installations worldwide and 300 clubs located in public housing — the majority of which are not standalone facilities.
And then there’s the Nantucket club, which not only has a permanent home but also is the area’s primary provider of youth programs. (The town’s parks and recreation commission runs four adult leagues and assesses fees for outside use of town fields, parking lots, and beaches for children’s events, but has ceded youth programming to the club.) The club’s goals are none too modest — they want to reach all kids in the community, and adults as well — but the budget is completely dependent on local fundraising.
The Nantucket club’s expansion, which was designed and constructed by Stanmar under a guaranteed fixed price, was complicated by the stringent requirements of the Nantucket Historic District Commission, which oversees all development on the island and ensures that its New England seaport aesthetic is preserved. The Nantucket HDC’s requirements are so detailed that its website has available for download not only a 184-page set of guidelines, but also separate appendices and documentation that offer drawings of chimneys, cornices, fences, front doors, windows, timber frames, and stoop railings.
Fitting in on Nantucket therefore means utilizing specific wood products such as shingles and adhering to rigid specifications for the slope of roofs, while also proving to the commission that a gymnasium won’t appear out of scale with other nearby structures. The club’s front elevation was therefore scaled down by burying the front of the building into a hill, which means that entering patrons are brought into a lobby that sits on the building’s second floor.
From the rear, the visual impact of the gym’s long two-story wall is mitigated by breaking it into five equal rectangles using white trim that is extra wide, shrinking the apparent size of each section to approach the look of the adjoining, smaller portions of the club. A centered window high within each rectangle brings daylight into the gym, and by positioning each in a line with the building’s other windows, further accentuates the ways in which the building’s largest volume matches its smallest. Although the gym’s pitched roof is much bigger, the eye reads the building’s aligned volumes as being of similar size.
These techniques are greatly aided by one of Stanmar’s key advantages with regard to consistency of scale — as a specialist in athletic facilities, the firm can place large-volume spaces such as gyms and arenas alongside athletic fields, where the distance serves to guard against architecture becoming imposing or intimidating.
The renovated interior floor plan responds to the club’s outdoor components, providing egress to vehicle drop-off zones, parking lots, and sports fields. The Nantucket club’s walk-in, after-school rush from the high school and middle school across the street (and from the nearby elementary school) had been such that kids lined up to enter found themselves subject to the whims of inclement weather. The new space was therefore designed with a large covered porch outside and a generous control desk that “floats” near the front vestibule, but away from the exterior wall.
Demolishing the old gymnasium was the key to reconfiguring the club’s space in a way that made for a logical progression through the building and preserved more of the club’s fields to the west. The new addition (linking the original building with the new gym) consists of the entry and game room/common area upstairs, and the dedicated teen center and kitchen (as well as ample gym storage, restrooms, and athletic director’s office) downstairs. Moving the kitchen out of the old arts and crafts room gives both programs more space and better, activity-specific space. Similarly, moving the prime social gathering areas into the addition has allowed the computer room, learning center, and snack area to expand to meet the club’s growth in membership. The new gym, counted on to produce revenue through outside rentals, was designed to operate independently of the youth center, and the availability of the new, commercial-grade kitchen allows the club to hold multipurpose functions there, as well.
One of the early design concepts generated ongoing discussion about the issues of supervision and autonomy that often plays out in youth centers. Current thinking is that teens in particular should be given a certain amount of freedom in this home away from home — this is why snack bars tend to be configured with self-serve cabinets and displays — and this doesn’t always square with administrators’ supervisory needs. In the case of the Nantucket club, two options for the teen center were under consideration: an overlook from the upper-floor commons into the teen center below (an architectural statement that allowed for ease of supervision) or a full upper floor in order to increase square footage of the commons. Eventually, the club decided on the additional program space, and administrators have high hopes that a more separate teen center will help curtail the natural tendency (and national trend, according to the BGCA) of teens to gradually abandon the youth center as they get older.
Oliver Snider is director of business development with Stanmar Inc., a Wayland, Mass.-based design-build firm specializing in multipurpose athletic facilities.
