Nashville Youth Campus for Empowerment

Project Statement

The Juvenile Justice Center Campus represents a new way of understanding how our justice system should work - restoring instead of punishing, connecting instead of isolating, and supporting instead of abandoning. Every aspect of the design and the operational model for the project centers on providing support instead of barriers. Consolidating the numerous services necessary to fully support young people and their families on a single campus in a safe, welcoming, and normative environment is at the heart of the project’s mission.

Over ten years ago, the growing need for a campus to better support Nashville’s youth began to gain traction. In 2017, an in-depth analysis of the programmatic needs for a consolidated facility and initial site selection process began. The resulting report targeted a building program of approximately 240,000 GSF over multiple buildings and the need for a project site that was geographically centered in the community with connections to public transportation.

The selected 14.9-acre site north of downtown Nashville offered 10 acres of buildable area to develop a campus-oriented solution. Early design inspiration studies about choosing one’s own path in life or empowerment and implementing trauma-informed design best practices focused on calming spaces with connections to nature drove a site deployment strategy that integrated the campus with the dynamic topography of the site. A “distributed courtyard” concept emerged to blur the lines between interior and exterior space and rethink the traditional, institutional architecture typology into one that supports healing and transformation. Greenspace in the form of public, private, and secure courtyards activate the campus and respond with moments of visual and physical respite.

The major building components of the campus are a combined Juvenile Pre-Trial Facility and Juvenile Courthouse, Secure Pre-Trial Housing Cottages, Respite and Assessment Center (Youth Shelter), Family Services Center (Parent Training and Education), and Parking Garage. Best practices for juvenile facilities and the abundance of high-volume, publicly-accessed functions dictated that a majority of the program be located between the first and second levels for juvenile safety and ease of access. The resulting 2-story scale of the campus design and the vibrant interior environments worked in support of projecting a welcoming and approachable architectural solution. The lone exception in height is the 5-story Juvenile Court Tower that delicately bridges the 2-story wings of the combined Pre-Trial Facility and Juvenile Courthouse, serving as a beacon to the community beyond the limits of the site.

Framework for Design Excellence Narrative

**Design for Energy**

At the forefront of the design team’s discussions for the campus design was a high-performance building form, envelope, and integrated systems efficiency to create a net-zero energy project.

With restorative justice in mind, the goal was to create an optimal indoor environment for the youth, families, employees, and visitors while mitigating the energy use required to do so, to preserve the rejuvenating setting of Nashville’s natural environment. In this vein, the team kicked off the project with user group workshops to help users identify their values regarding user experience and sustainability. Users expressed that building resiliency, energy use reduction, operational optimization, health and well-being, and improving indoor and outdoor environmental quality were top priorities for NYCE. The following energy-related goals were developed using these priorities: reducing operational energy use and emissions to help preserve local air quality, using durable and resilient materials that would not need to be replaced frequently during the lifetime of the building (therefore reducing embodied energy and emissions), and reducing water and food waste.

The path to net zero energy started with an energy benchmark and Architecture 2030 goal set using the Zero Tool, a 55% energy cost savings minimum target per the LEED Optimize Energy Performance credit, and estimations on the rooftop photovoltaic (PV) system sizes and surface area needed to meet expected energy use. 

During pre-design, energy modeling was used to compare two concepts for the buildings’ orientation and massing – an exploration of utilizing passive design features to harness the site and local climate to drive down energy demand. With Nashville’s hot summers, it is considered a cooling-dominated climate, therefore self-shading was utilized in the design and orientation of the buildings. These simple box models showed that a 3-wing distributed concept yielded around 9% lower annual energy use than a courtyard concept. The wings in this design enable ample daylighting to brighten the spaces within and decrease dependency on electric lighting. With this as a basis for the building form, the building façade was further developed to include external shading devices to block the direct heat of the sun as well as provide privacy for the housing courtyard. As the building envelope design developed further, window to wall ratio was reduced, particularly for spandrel area, to reduce the heat transfer through the building envelope, and prioritizing removing vision glass from lower-traffic areas.

In addition to passive reduction in cooling load to decrease energy use, energy modeling was also used to compare a more traditional mixed-fuel central plant to one with all-electric and renewable energy systems. The traditional plant included fossil-fuel-fired boilers and water-cooled chillers. The all-electric plant featured a ground-source heat pump with four-times-higher heating efficiency, decreased cooling efficiency, and a dedicated outdoor air system with heat recovery and fan coil units to reduce the amount of air and conditioning energy used for space heating and cooling. Compared to the mixed-fuel system, the all-electric system was found to reduce energy use by 12%, with substantial heating savings offsetting the cooling efficiency loss and pumping needed for the heat pump.

The wells needed for the heat pump system were found to be problematic due to the geography of the site, so a third round of energy modeling and integrated design discussions yielded a design with heat recovery chiller system with energy recovery ventilators, reduced window to wall ratio, and clerestory windows and a light well in the housing areas to decrease electric lighting load. The design continues to be optimized.    

Targets of 50% irrigation water use reduction through water reuse and 25% reduction in indoor fixture water use through selection of efficient fixtures were set to reduce pumping energy and energy used for heating domestic hot water. These features were paired with water metering to track and improve system performance over time, and will serve as a benchmark for other building projects. 

After the load reduction and efficiency optimizations are finalized, rooftop photovoltaics will be used to offset the campus energy use to make this a net zero energy project.

With LEED-aligned enhanced commissioning and advanced energy metering in place, the project is poised to allow for review of the performance of each set of building systems to help identify areas where operations are diverging from the design intent, and to note where performance optimization should be prioritized whenever further technology or other opportunities arise.

In addition to operational energy reduction, the design team plans to utilize whole-building life-cycle assessment (LCA) to review and improve the materials selections carbon impact; materials were selected to be durable and resilient. Tying up a holistic net-zero-focused design, the project incorporated a composting program as well as promotion of low-impact transportation including on-site showers, bike parking, bike paths, and electric vehicle charging stations.


**Design for Equitable Communities**

The vision for the project is to be a national model for juvenile justice by taking a holistic approach that promotes the health, well-being, and safety of children, families, and communities. To accomplish this, it was imperative that everyone was given a voice and a platform to exchange ideas. Before and during design, three open community meetings were held to receive commentary and direction from residents, staff, and people with a relationship to the juvenile justice system. Through those meetings we heard the needs for a “safe, welcoming, and nonjudgmental courts building,” “campus-style flow,” “access to greenspace,” “connections to nature,” and “avoid the government building atmosphere.” This direction from the community and staff shaped the final design and established the metrics for project success. Design progression was shared at several milestone moments during project development for additional feedback and discussion.

 

The scale of the project and the multiple building typologies leaned heavily on the “campus-style flow” and “connection to nature” vision statements. The entry and arrival sequence were carefully orchestrated to be welcoming and inviting without being overwhelming. An architectural dialogue between the main Juvenile Courthouse entry, parking garage, and the Respite and Assessment Center/Family Service Building was coupled with prioritizing the human experience through an articulated ground plane of pavers, seat walls, and vibrant landscaping. A revitalized public transit stop has been strategically relocated to this portion of the site to better serve the visitors to the campus.

 

Programmatically the campus brings a diverse array of services that support our most vulnerable population—children. The Respite and Assessment Center provides evaluation and housing for youth found outside of school and on the street. Counseling services and a place to eat and sleep have now replaced the old model of detention and isolation. The Family Services Center teaches parents life skills and techniques to better support the children in their lives. All these services are provided outside of the courthouse in a smaller, more intimate setting.

 

The courthouse features a large, transformable community meeting space on the first floor immediately adjacent to the entry as one of the first areas visitors can access upon entering the building. The Community Room was programmed into the project as a valuable resource for training and gathering. Spaces within the courthouse reference the varied cultures in the community through artwork and messaging for wayfinding signage. Multilingual signage and wall graphics thread through the project interior, connecting people to place. The use of graphics is extended to the campus parking garage with integrated exterior screens that will include graphics generated from artwork specifically created by youth within the justice system for this location.


**Design for Well-Being**

Designing for well-being takes on a heightened purpose in the context of the youth, families, and staff who live, work, and access the services provided at this all-encompassing Juvenile Justice Campus. Both primary and secondary trauma concerns are at the heart of what a modern justice facility must acknowledge in its design approach to occupant comfort, physical safety, and mental and emotional health.

At the onset, the goal was to chart a new path for the experience and environment that the campus and buildings would contribute to support holistic well-being for all. As a baseline, consider what traditional environments entail:

·       Painted CMU partitions

·       Cold stainless steel plumbing fixtures

·       All white or neutral color palate

·       Limited access to daylight or views to nature

·       Controlled outdoor experiences

·       Heightened sense of enclosure (razor wire)

·       Loud and acoustically challenging environments (abundance of hard surfaces)

The proposed design acknowledges the benefits of emotional outlets and normative design strategies provided by access to nature, enlivened interior spaces with natural light, and implementing materials and colors that are calming, acoustically tuned, and depart from institutional aesthetics. This new campus features:

·       Abuse-resistant drywall in lieu of CMU

·       Porcelain finished plumbing fixtures

·       Calming, diverse color palettes

·       Abundant access to daylight

·       Active and accessible courtyard spaces

·       Passive, safe security measures

·       Acoustically-tuned spaces

·       Normative furniture and furnishings

·       Environmental graphics with aspirational and restorative visual content

·       Respite rooms for mental and emotional well-being

·       Low lighting strategies to promote re-regulation.

 

As a result of these overarching goals, design across the campus prioritized daylighting strategies, access to nature through integrated landscaped courtyards, and a warm, colorful material palette. The courthouse amplified daylight opportunities through a series of narrow office wings that wrapped around landscaped, outdoor courtyards. Public waiting spaces, common areas such as conferencing spaces and breakrooms, and employee work areas were all oriented with visual connections to the courtyards with daylight access. Pre-Trial Youth program spaces such as dining, visitation, and education functions are given similar views via the secure courtyard that connects to the housing cottages. Each housing cottage uses upper clerestory windows and a lightwell to bring daylight to the common areas and each sleeping room has its own individual window with views to nature.  

Trauma-informed design features focused on reducing stressors for the public through natural finishes, views to the outside, acoustic comfort, and multiple waiting area options that include experiences for multi-generational users with varying abilities. Secure Pre-Trial Housing Cottages, Dining, Visitation, and programs areas for Pre-Trial Programs also focused on normative design through a continuation in the use of natural finishes, acoustic comfort, non-institutional lighting and furniture selections, and the integration of custom imagery to promote restorative development. All interior finishes were sourced from Red List free product lines and specified to meet low VOC requirements.