Mind the Children, with a Double Purpose
After a few years practising as architect and designer, working on a varied range of projects types, scales, and contexts, I became interested in the territories of childhood. It was the starting point of this studio.
Our approach to design spaces and objects with sensitivity towards children has a double purpose:
One is to provide designed environments that not only support children’s development but also foster their creativity and learning processes.
This is to provide materials, objects, and spaces that allow children to appropriate, explore, and manipulate in their own way, to create new narratives, stories, and games. (1)
And not only within built environments dedicated to children, like schools or playgrounds, but also in other situations, like public spaces in cities or cultural installations.
It is about thinking that children can inhabit places beyond what we might think initially, and we want to design sensitively towards them.
Empowering children through meaningful and well-designed environments means, to my mind, working towards a better future.
The other purpose is to learn and get inspired by the strategies used by children to explore their environment and construct knowledge, to then design environments that are to be inhabited by adults.
Some of these strategies include playing, movement, multisensory perception, attention to detail, and creating imaginary worlds. (2)
Another concept that interest me is that young children are not yet influenced too much by adults and socio-cultural factors, they play without pre-established codes, and have a more pure aesthetic response.
I think there is an opportunity here to explore this territory, and find out more about beauty, to create environments that stimulate our minds and body in positive ways.
Notes:
1. Because of my interest and concerns about education, I learned and got inspired by the philosophies of Montessori and Reggio Emilia, and the research being carried by Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Part of the research done in collaboration between teachers and pedagogues from Reggio Emilia with Howard Gardner and Harvard Project Zero is published in the book,
Giudici, Claudia, et al., Eds. Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners. Reggio Children, 2011: 252
More information about Project Zero can be found here, pz.harvard.edu/
2. A well-documented description of strategies used by children to explore their environment can be found in this book,
Cabanellas, Isabel, et al., Eds. Territorios de la Infancia: Diálogos entre Arquitectura y Pedagogía. Grao, 2005
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