Frank Gehry made his mark on Los Angeles architecture with the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, but his new pro bono design for a children’s center in the city’s low-income Watts neighborhood will be significant for its purpose as much as its aesthetics.

Gehry recently unveiled his firm’s plans for the Children’s Institute Inc.’s new $35 million campus. CII, a nonprofit group that serves children coping with poverty, violence, and trauma, described the campus as “ a beacon of hope in the surrounding landscape .” The new Watts location is expected to annually serve 5,000 children and their family members.

How did Gehry get involved with the project? When CII was starting to plan its campus, board member Gelila Assefa Puck, whose husband is famed chef Wolfgang Puck, said she would ask Gehry, who is a friend. “We thought she was dreaming big,” says Nina Revoyr, CII’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, “but turned out it was a fulfillable dream.”

She says there was initial skepticism about the project, and an attitude of “Why would anyone want to put anything beautiful in Watts?” But, Revoyr says, “why shouldn’t Watts have a Frank Gehry building?”

The two-acre campus will feature a series of two-story buildings with the shiny roofs that Gehry is known for . The design includes counseling rooms, community meeting spaces, indoor and outdoors areas for afterschool activities, and more. “While it’s interesting and beautiful and creative, it’s not extravagant,” Revoyr says. “There are flashes of Gehry magic, but it won’t overpower its surroundings.”

CII opened another location—it’s Koning Eizenberg Architecture–designed Otis Booth campus in Central Los Angeles—in 2011, so, having completed a project so recently, the group learned what worked and what to do differently the next time, Revoyr says. For example, there is dedicated stroller parking in the new design, as well as a dedicated teen center.

“As you can imagine, we are a little nonprofit, so it was fairly intimidating to work with the world’s most famous architect,” Revoyr says. “But he’s so low-key, so humble, so open. I really believe he feels an affinity for the kids he works with and for Watts itself. The project seems very personal to him.”

CII has secured about half of the funding so far, Revoyr says, and the group hopes to break ground in 2018 and open the center in 2019.

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