Between Home and Hospital
Chicago’s Lawrence Hall builds a residential treatment building that culminates 140 years of child welfare design.

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a residential treatment facility for at-risk youth that reflects current trends in urban design?

Summary: The Residential Treatment Center at Lawrence Hall in Chicago provides the safety and security appropriate for a child welfare agency that treats at-risk children while still offering a warm and reassuring community-based experience. Its design, as well as previous Lawrence Hall residential buildings, has adapted prevailing urbanism models to this particular youth treatment setting. It is the first part of a three-phase renovation of the entire campus, all by local architecture firm McBride Kelley Baurer.

As a child welfare agency that has been around since the Civil War, Lawrence Hall Youth Services in Chicago has seen prevailing design solutions come and go with the decades. Since 1865, it has provided shelter, education, and treatment for children in Illinois dealing with severe emotional and behavioral challenges from trauma, abuse, and neglect. As a mirror of the same design approaches that have been shaping cities for the past 140 years, Lawrence Hall’s campus has worked its way through imposing Beaux Arts institutionalism and mid-20th century suburbanization. In February, it celebrated the opening of its newest replacement to its aging facilities—a condominium-style Residential Treatment Center that balances institutional safety and security with residential comfort.

Lawrence Hall’s new center is the first part of a three-phase master plan by the Chicago firm of McBride Kelley Baurer. The second phase will include a school with vocational classrooms, computer labs, and outdoor study spaces. The last phase will be a new administrative building and outdoor recreation facilities. Lawrence Hall, which cares for 1,100 children, sits on a triangular seven-acre site in northwest Chicago. McBride Kelley Baurer’s master plan will create six new buildings that huddle around a central courtyard.

The four-story, 50,000-square-foot residence building will be a permanent home for 48 children with intensive treatment needs. The ground floor (clad in concrete) contains a cafeteria, counseling spaces, and medical offices, with an abundance of windows and natural light. The top three floors (in red brick, with aluminum-clad windows) are divided into six condo-style residential units, each for eight kids and a staff supervisor. Each child has his or her own bedroom, but they share common living spaces and kitchens.

Problems and solutions
Beyond construction maintenance issues (uneven heating and cooling, a sinking and cracking foundation), the previous freestanding residential cottages on campus presented a host of design issues. The concrete blocks used in the interior of these single family-style houses contributed to a cold, institutional atmosphere that residents immediately recognized and rejected. Poor lines of sight for staff supervision of children, small living spaces, and a lack of independent study spaces also plagued the residences.

Mary Hollie, Lawrence Hall’s CEO, says that the cottage-style residences were made obsolete when Lawrence Hall acquired single-family homes beyond the campus. Many of the agency’s wards needed treatment that was much more intensive than it had been in the past, and these freestanding homes didn’t facilitate this increased need.

“What we didn’t have was a treatment facility that would really deal with the most traumatized youth in a treatment setting that was homelike but created a sense of community that focused on the safety of the kids,” says Hollie.

High-impact drywall is used for the walls, and the floors are carpeted or tiled with vinyl. To accommodate the eight adolescents who will use the units’ shared spaces, the architects made common rooms large. To avoid the feeling of an anonymous warehousing institution, the architects broke up these big rooms with cabinetry dividers and different ceiling heights. Jack Kelley, AIA, a principal at McBride Kelley Baurer, says he wanted to design spaces where kids could do separate things while not having to be in separate rooms. The architects avoided glass enclosures positioned as surveillance posts for staff in favor of open-planned workstations. “The subtlety of that is important,” says Kelley.

A new model
To reinforce the public/private organization of the building and the campus, private bedrooms face the private side of the buildings, and the common spaces face the open public courtyard that knits the campus together. The establishment of this campus centerpiece illustrates changes in child welfare theory and practice, as well as urban design trends. As the institutional orphanage-style residential units at Lawrence Hall gave way to suburban cottage-style houses in the 1960s, millions of Americans were fleeing city centers and populating suburbs with freestanding houses on half-acre lots. Today, that model seems lacking in child-welfare housing and elsewhere. The courtyard that will organize the new campus and the vertically stacked residences reflects an embrace of contemporary New Urbanist ideas about sacrificing private green space for shared, public green space to foster chance interactions and a sense of community.

“The suburban model was objects in space—a lot of area around each building,” Kelley says. “That creates the problem of the staff and kids not seeing each other as they’re passing.”

Leaders
Hollie says she told the architects at McBride Kelley Baurer the anticipated needs she felt Lawrence Hall would encounter and her general vision of what this might look like and let Kelley and his team work out specific design parameters. Both the client and the architects toured similar facilities across the country and didn’t see much that looked like what they built. Today, the 143-year-old institution is etching out a new paradigm for residential youth services living.

“We’re a leader in this,” says Hollie. “We have other agencies and entities that [came] to the open house to be ‘spies.’”