Nationwide Children’s Hospital Child Care Center

Located on the main campus of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the new Child Care Center offers daycare and early childhood education services for the children of the hospital’s staff and employees. Our team collaborated with the Child Care Center staff and hospital administration to develop a plan to meet current and future staff demand for Child Care services, expand the program’s offerings, and to design a center commensurate with the Child Care Center’s status as a leader in early childhood development.

To solve the challenges of a tight urban site, we created a design that focused on efficiencies and flexibility to minimize the footprint of the two-story building. The building features a transparent core and double-height lobby, framing views to a park across the street. The playgrounds, designed as natural playscapes, surround the rest of the building to extend the active learning environment of each classroom and reinforce the nature-themed brand of the hospital system found throughout the building and the NCH campus.

The project was built on the site of the parking lot for the existing center and was constructed in two phases to allow the program to move into the completed first phase before demolishing the existing building and constructing the second phase and additional staff parking. Once complete, the new Child Care Center will roughly double the existing center’s enrollment, provide larger gyms, offer new spaces as extended learning environments to promote active learning, add art and reading rooms, add a commercial kitchen to locally prepare fresh meals and reduce operating costs, and increase staff resources and training spaces. Currently, phase one of this project is complete.

Wellogy completed master planning, including site layout and selection, programming, space planning, interior design, and finish selections, building code analysis, cost estimating, and full architectural services. Additionally, our team participated in and coordinated landscape and playground design. The design of the overall site and building allowed the Child Care Center to maintain continuous operations while we constructed a brand-new center in the same location. By using an oversized cast-stone masonry façade, the exterior design achieved the project budget while mimicking the hospital’s large high-rise buildings clad with precast panels, to strengthen the overall campus identity and aesthetic, and imparting the same sense of promise that all families feel at a Nationwide Children’s Hospital facility.

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