MORE SPACE FOR LIFELONG LEARNING: The Princeton Senior Resource Center’s new facility on Poor Farm Road, the Nancy S. Klath Center for Lifelong Learning, will be unveiled to the public at several community open houses this month, following the grand opening on November 4.

By Anne Levin

Anyone who has attended a class, lecture, or event at the Princeton Senior Resource Center’s (PSRC) Suzanne Patterson building knows that the site is short on space and parking. The grand opening on Thursday of PSRC’s new location on Poor Farm Road, which will supplement the original building, brings the senior center into a new era of light, space, and plenty of parking.

“We often say we are a senior center unlike any other,” said Drew Dyson, PSRC’s chief executive officer, during a tour of the new building this week. “We wanted this to be a place people are drawn to. We were very intentional about making it a destination.”

Across the atrium from the law firm Mason, Griffin & Pierson, the Nancy S. Klath Center for Lifelong Learning takes a visual cue from its wooded setting. The high-tech classrooms, state-of-the-art technology lab, first floor lounge, lecture hall, and teaching lab all look out on the surrounding trees. So do PSRC’s offices, which have been moved from the Patterson Center, where art studios will take their place.

Architects Juliet Richardson and Terry Smith of the Princeton firm Richardson Smith Architects looked to the surrounding trees when turning what was previously two stories of office space into something that reflected PSRC’s purpose and creative ideals.

“One of the things we noticed right away was how there was this incredibly strict, boxy building sitting on a lovely landscape,” said Richardson. “We thought, ‘how can we transform this?’ We considered it to be a meeting place. We didn’t want it to be institutional. We wanted it to be about community and building friendships, a place you could come and gather and meet people.”

The architects visualized the first floor, which has a lounge area, as a kind of interior landscape. The blue and green carpeting is meant to evoke the movement of a river. In the lecture hall, carpeting is dark and chairs alternate between three different shades, “assembled like a Seurat painting,” said Richardson.

Instead of hard, traditional walls in the hallway, they created curving, wooden walls evocative of a forest, and sculptured wooden window seats to bring the landscape inside.

“This was a fun project,” said Smith. “As we got into it and started trying to reimagine the kind of space you’d find in an institutional or educational building, we knew we wanted it to flow. We didn’t want people to feel confined. So all of these ideas were percolating and coming together.”

Learning from the pandemic, PSRC has invested heavily in technology to provide continued hybrid learning. “Many people love the virtual opportunities and want that to continue,” said Dyson. “We love when people are in the building, but we also recognize that the virtual alternative is important. And the new tech lab is three-and-a-half times bigger than the old one.”

The total capital campaign for the 12,000-square-foot building is $5.3 million, 80 percent of which has been raised. “We’re about to move into the public phase of the campaign,” said Dyson, who credits the architects and Bancroft Construction Company for getting the job done quickly. “To do this total remodeling under a year is phenomenal,” he said.

Smith considered Dyson to be “a great client,” he said. “As we came up with him, he was very interested and open, and really embraced a whole lot of strategies and metaphors. You need your client to be on board and have a little bit of faith. So that was really rewarding and gratifying.”

The Suzanne Patterson location will continue to be used for exercise classes, art classes, flu shot clinics, and the like. Driving between the two locations takes less than 10 minutes, and both are on New Jersey Transit and the municipality’s free bus routes.

Following the grand opening and ribbon-cutting on Thursday, November 4, community open houses are on November 11, 14, 17, 30; and December 3. Register at princetonsenior.link/CommunityOpenHouses.

“I know it can be hard to envision, so we are very excited to get people in here,” said Dyson. “I think they are going to love it. The excitement is building.”