Caltech Children’s Center
Pasadena California
The Children’s Center at Caltech was a Design-Build partnership between MATT Construction and Rios Clementi Hale Studios (RCHS).
The new center fosters the cultivation of curiosity and inquiry with a facility designed as a children’s laboratory for natural phenomena and a curriculum that integrates S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) into the daily life of each age group.
At the heart of Caltech’s new childcare center lies the arroyo, a dry streambed designed to support and expand the school’s educational mission of encouraging children to play, explore, discover, and engage with the world. Filled with local granite, native grasses, bugs, birds, and lizards, the arroyo is a play feature and bioswale, filtering and dispersing rainwater collected onsite and stored in large cisterns.
Project Manager and Lead Designer for Landscape at RCHS, 2013-2015. Design Team Project Credits, Architecture: Julie Smith-Clementi, Tom Myers, Sabrina Schmidt-Wetekam
Cargo Collective, Inc. Los Angeles, Calif.