Miniature Architecture

Kinderspelen, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

“… that there ought to be a child in every adult and that an adult’s city ought to remain a city for the child, built out of chaos and dreams.”
Aldo Van Eyck in Humanist Rebel, 1998

WHAT

Open-Air Kindergarten, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, 1992.

This project develops on the belief that architecture can serve as a medium to shape and speak with young children during their crucial years of development and be their third teacher.Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger, with over 50 years of experimenting with educational institutions, states that even though over time the ideas about education, architecture criteria and spatial resources may change, “how children learn and how you make space for them to do so have not changed” (Alle Scholen, 2009) The project seeks to develop a ‘classroom’ where play and learning take place in the same setting; where children can be both safe and adventurous, feel at home yet open to the world and provokes individualism while encourages collective creativity. Potential sites will contain some of the following qualities: leftover/abandoned spaces in the urban context of Hong Kong, a site by elements like trees, body of water, hills, etc. It will look at methods in which architecture can integrate and extend into the physical environment for children to learn from the rawness of their surrounding and how things around them work. The spaces will be informed by the children’s behavioral patterns and habits, their playful nature, and how they interact and learn. Surfaces and materials will be explored along with the use of traditional and contemporary medias as a mean of teaching through architecture.

WHY

Open-Air Kindergarten, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, 1992.

Modernity saw educational institutions as a prefabricated and mechanized scheme. Spaces are appropriated for giving-receiving instructions, allowing little room left for children to engage and learn from the physical environment. Educationist Ken Robinson compares schools today to factory lines with separate facilities and procedures to go through.  Outdoor spaces like playgrounds were results of large-scale urban planning with very generic layouts. Architects like Aldo Van Eyck, Herman Hertzberger, and Rudolf Steiner, to name a few, sought alternatives in which architecture and its environment can influence children’s learning in parallel to their development steps. Van Eyck, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most popular philosopher in that age, criticized large-scale abstraction and encouraged unique ‘situations’ planning. Rudolf Steiner affirmed that children (especially under the age of 7) do not learn by instruction or admonition but by imitation and examples. Steiner stated in Educating Children Today that physical environment shapes physical organs: “The child will develop good sight if his environment has the right conditions of light and color…” As a result, it is crucial to rethink and redesign educational institutes for young children in ways that are specific to their developments.

HOW

Ring Around a Tree, Tezuka Architects, 2011.
The how of the project will start from a close study of children’s playing and learning behaviors and ways they interact with architecture. Photo/video documentations will be employed for observation/analysis/collection of data. If possible I would also like to collect young children’s drawings for reference/study. Through the qualities intended for the site described earlier, potential sites will be evaluated, analyzed, and selected accordingly. A series of analysis of older and recent kindergarten/playgrounds will be analyzed in order to gain a better understanding of the organizations, sectional and structural strategies for young children’s architecture for play and learn. The thesis will then undertake an intensive investigation of the surfaces of the media of interaction between children and the architecture (e.g. chalk boards, tables, chairs, floor, openings, lighting) The materiality of the design (different textures such as sand, mirror, water) will be explore in parallel to the study of the children’s five senses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Aldo Van Eyck, 1999, Humanist Rebel: Inbetweening in a Postwar World, 010 Publishers.
2. Met teksten van, Herman Hertzberger, Abram de Swaan, 2009, The Schools of herman Hertzberger=Alle scholen, 010 Publishers.
3. Herbert C. Bowen, 1893, Froebel and Education by Self-activity, Charles Scribner’s Sonseton Press.
4. Rudolf Steiner, 2008, Educating Children Today, Sophia Books.
5. Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
6. Peter Zumthor, 2010, Thinking Architecture, Birkhauser.
7. Stephen Barber, 2002, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, Reaktion.