The Living/Learning Cabin
A Prototype Design for Children with Disabilities
National Endowment for the Arts
Variety the Children’s Charity of the Delaware Valley
Collaborators: Sally Harrison (PI)
Ulysses Sean Vance (Co-PI)
Farzaneh Tahmasbi
Temple University Tyler Art and Architecture Urban Workshop
The project is partnership between the Temple Urban Workshop and Variety, the Children’s Charity of the Delaware Valley, a well-established organization that is located on 77 acres in Montgomery County. Variety was founded in the 1950’s as a summer camp for wheelchair-dependent children afflicted with polio during the epidemic. For the last decade the organization has transitioned to year-round programming for a broader constituency, providing after-school programs and workforce training for young adults, as well as their summer camp. Many of its young people have both intellectual and physical disabilities, so their needs are diverse.
Variety’s facilities are worn, and do not adequately support or reflect the quality of the service the organization now provides. After undergoing a broad master planning process in 2019, Variety invited the Urban Workshop at Tyler to partner with them and to work closely with the staff and the children they serve to produce an architectural design that celebrates inclusivity in a well-researched, joyful, and innovative way.
The Urban Workshop has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Projects to design a prototype for the first of its proposed buildings - The Living/Learning Cabin. The cabin prototype will provide a model for the dozen others that are planned for the campus; the cabin spaces will be the essential touchstones for the young people who come to the Variety campus throughout the year and must be designed with utmost care.
The challenge of the prototype is to create a space that can adjust and transform according to the different programmatic requirements - from an after-school site, to an extended learning classroom, to a summer sleeping cabin, and to provide an inclusive environment for diverse diagnoses, from Cerebral Palsy to Downs to Autism. As part of the architectural design process, the Urban Workshop has undertaken substantial research into the literature and case studies around the particular spatial needs for the neuro-divergent populations Variety serves. Both the design prototype and the research are applicable not only to Variety’s campus buildings, but to other organizations that serve disabled populations.
The research and design team includes Professor Sally Harrison Director of the Urban Workshop, Associate Professor U. Sean Vance, and Graduate Research Assistant Farzaneh Tahmasbi. Professor Vance led a seminar that focused on health design issues related to The Living/Learning Cabin Prototype.