12/01/2025
Center for Transforming Lives has been recognized with both the Community Impact Award and the highest honor — the Honor Award — at the 2025 AIA Fort Worth Excellence in Architecture Design Awards.
The Center for Transforming Lives (CTL) is a non-profit dedicated to interrupting the cycle of poverty by providing centralized, trauma-informed multi-generational services to women and their children. The program includes spaces for a child development center, an economic mobility center, a drop in day care, counseling, financial aid and housing offices.
After a yearslong search, CTL purchased a windowless vacant department store building in southeast Fort Worth, located near many of CTL’s clients and public transportation. Employing the principles and palette of trauma-informed design throughout, two bays of the building were removed to create a light-filled enclosed courtyard. A north facing curtain wall pulls natural light into the Child Development Center (CDC) and Economic Mobility Center. Additional window openings were cut into the foot-thick concrete exterior walls.
Classrooms in the CDC were designed as small houses on ‘streets’ to mitigate the scale for the younger children. The houses pe*****te the curtain wall and express themselves in the main courtyard.
The site featured a single oak tree, located just east of the building, which had survived decades of neglect as the site sat vacant. This ‘Survivor Tree’ became the centerpiece of the CDC playground and a metaphor for CTL’s clients who are themselves tenacious survivors. An interior play area in the CDC features an abstraction of the Survivor Tree as its centerpiece.
The new building has allowed CTL to expand their highly successful wrap around services to more participants, revitalizing a neighborhood and transforming lives.
Thank you to the Center for Transforming Lives for your partnership and unwavering commitment to our community along with all our partners, Studio Outside, Evolving Texas, LA Fuess, and Solare that helped bring this project to reality.
Interior photos by Menary Studio
Exterior photos by Brandon Burns, AIA