Kids' stuff: combining sturdy materials with spatial clarity, this little nursery school in Roubaix forms a cheerful enclave for its young charges

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1997 by Charlotte Ellis

The Centre de la Petite Enfance opened a year ago, designed by the Lille-based architects Grafteaux and Klein as part of a slum clearance and urban renewal scheme implemented by Roubaix town council in a residential neighbourhood south of the town centre. In the early 1990s Roubaix town council initiated the demolition of several housing terraces in the rue de Bouvines, the clearance of slums on the backland behind them and the reuse of the site for a small sports ground with changing rooms, premises for a neighbourhood club and a centre providing a range of facilities for very young children.

Benoit Grafteaux and Richard Klein - who set up their architectural partnership in Lille in 1987 - were invited to submit designs for the new buildings in 1992. They proposed that accommodation be disposed around a small forecourt set back from the street frontage, in two buildings located on either side of entrance gates to the sports ground. This approach was adopted, the site cleared and the sports ground laid out by the council's directorate of technical services.

The Centre de la Petite Enfance has a total net floor area of 720sq m and contains a day nursery for babies and toddlers, a playgroup for three-to-six-year-olds and a small paediatric unit for regular medical check-ups. Public access is by a common entrance reached by steps or ramp from the forecourt fronting the street. Thereafter, the three main elements of the building are distinctly defined and separated both from each other and the street and the sports ground. Day nursery and playgroup each have a small west-facing garden, reached by a shared pergola, while the slope of the site has been exploited to raise the paediatric unit above ground level on a substantial stone plinth. Fixed perforated metal screens over windows provide additional privacy and shade from direct sunlight and also act as a buffer against stray footballs. People entering and leaving the building are protected from the rain by a generous roof overhang above the main entrance.

Standards of construction are good and external walls are of cavity masonry with a brick outer face (not slip tiles on concrete as is all too common) in a rational reinterpretation of local traditions. But the neighbourhood is rough, and intermittent but determined vandalism has revealed the bricks to be hollow, not solid. No doubt tougher bricks will be used for the smaller building, containing changing rooms and neighbourhood club, when the time comes to build it.