The Woodlands at White Oaks Park

The Woodlands at White Oaks Park is an anchor building for a densely forested Park District park in Wood Dale, Illinois. The building serves the people of Wood Dale as a destination for recreation programming, community meetings, and education. The scope of work included the demolition of a small cabin, storage shed, and small classroom with a replacement of a new, approximately 2,350 sq. ft. building. The building has a flexible space plan to accommodate a range of occupant sizes and types as well as a range of venue types by providing both indoor and outdoor rooms. The interior rooms can expand into one large space by combining two smaller meeting rooms to appeal to the greatest range of occupants. These rooms face the park and invite the outdoors into the indoor rooms with an expansive southern wall of windows. This wall of windows wraps around the building’s east façade allowing the large indoor assembly to spill out into the large, covered picnic area to the east to further blur the line between indoors and outdoors. Indoor and outdoor restrooms have also been included within the building footprint. The outdoor accessible bathrooms together with the large, covered picnic area further reinforce a transitional space program by inviting the Park’s outdoor and indoor occupants to have a shared use of the building. The scope also included the improvement and expanding of an existing parking lot and associated access drives and the creation of an open meadow area for community viewing and gatherings, including way finding pathways and supporting amenities.