Littleton, MA – Triumph Modular, the Northeast’s premier provider of temporary and permanent modular buildings, today announced the completion of its latest project – a custom designed, green modular facility for the Harvard Yard Child Care Center and Oxford Street Daycare Cooperative in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The new 5,700 square-foot child care facility – located on the campus of Harvard University – includes a variety of green, sustainable features to achieve the highest-quality, healthy environment for children and employees.
“Who would have thought that a green, relocatable modular building would be so welcome? But what was even more surprising to everyone involved was that a project like this could be so cost effective,” said Cliff Cort, President of Triumph Modular. “Triumph is proud to have installed this innovative sustainable building on Harvard’s campus. And we are thrilled that the children served by it will have a healthy new space in which to learn and grow.”
The modular building features solar tube skylights to maximize natural light use, sustainable “Green Guard” insulation, high-grade sealants, and a white rubber roof that reflects solar heat. Air quality is maintained with non-toxic construction materials, finish surfaces, and paints containing low levels or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and a high-efficiency Bard mechanical system. That system – which has tested up to 35 times quieter than traditional systems – was selected to reduce sound transfer to facilitate learning.
Other features of the child care center include exterior sun shades that shield the interior of the facility from the sun and reduce the need for air conditioning, recycled materials for the interior walls and carpet tiles, and a state of the art HVAC system that regulates and brings in air from the outside as needed. Controls are used to modulate both temperature and ventilation based on varying occupancy in each room and coordinated sensors turn off lights when there is no activity in the room.
“The building actually learns over time from the occupancy patterns and adjusts the ventilation appropriately,” said Peter Anderson of Anderson and Anderson in San Francisco, which designed the facility. “When you walk inside there is an immediate sense that this is a healthy environment. That’s a good comfort for parents and staff.”
For the next 18 months, the building will house the Harvard Yard Child Care Center, and then the Oxford Street Daycare Cooperative, while their permanent locations are being renovated. Once Harvard completes renovations, the fully relocatable Triumph building –which has a 50-year lifespan – will be placed into service elsewhere.
Triumph Modular has long been committed to designing and implementing sustainable modular classrooms, and has worked with some of the most innovative architects in the industry. The company created the Triumph Smartspace building system –one of the first moveable modular classrooms in the country designed with sustainability in mind – which won multiple green design awards for its application at the Carroll School in Lincoln, Mass. Earlier this year, Triumph also created and installed a high-performance modular preschool building in North Andover, Mass. The company is also involved in developing zero-net energy applications for high-performance modular, and is part of an innovative collaboration to develop the CASE 21 “perfect classroom” – a high-performance learning environment employing state-of-the-art classroom design.
