Spaces for children

The famous book, ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery opens with a young boy talking about a story that left an impact on him- a tale of a boa constrictor that swallows its prey whole. He decides to draw it after a lot of thought, and it looks like this.

 

The boy is bewildered that the adults refuse to accept his drawing as that of a boa constrictor, and insist that it is a hat. When he then drew the same image with the elephant seen inside the boa constrictor, the adults asked him to stop drawing images of boa constrictors with their insides showing.

Like the adults in the book, most of us tend to stop seeing the world the way a child does, losing the curiosity and innocence. This continues to be a dilemma for architects when designing spaces for children. As Pablo Picasso said- every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist when you grow up. How can these qualities of innocence and inquisitiveness be brought out in spaces designed for children?

Usually, when a child enters a new space, they immediately want to explore the space. They relish the possibility of going around and coming back to the same place, giving a sense of security- a place to hide, but also a place to come back to. This is something that can be facilitated through architecture too, and was tried out in the project Fuji Kindergarten by Tezuka Architects, where the roof where children can go around and come back to the same place becomes a very powerful element. The project also has other details which help the children experience this space differently, such as bars as a parapet so that they can sit at the very edge and drop their legs down.

The other common instinctive reaction of young children is related to eye level. There is an instant desire to climb and sit at a higher level, so that you can feel you are looking below from above the adult eye level. Being sensitive to this is important, and giving children a chance to climb up and explore this eye level through design can be an interesting element.

 

Scale, eye level and lack of clear demarcation of wall and floor can make a space very exciting for children, even if this is not specifically designed for children. One such incidental space is the Underground City in Cappadoccia, where the ceiling is around 5 feet high and adults can barely stand. But when a group of children enter the same space, they become comfortable and happy running around as the scale was fit just for them, where the wall becomes the floor.

When designing for children, such an image of children exploring a space with no boundaries can be very inspiring- where children have the chance to touch and feel materials, respond to them.

At this age, you want to feel different textures. You don’t know if a fire is going to burn you, so you would touch it to check.

Eye levels can also be inverted to be made exciting for children, for example, in the classroom exercise in the image below, they painted the underside of the table, invoking an imagination of how Michelangelo may have painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

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In Frank LLoyd Wright’s Home and Studio at Chicago, the children’s room was designed as space within space with multiple levels, to give children a sense of exploring different eye levels and scales within the comfort and security of their room. 

 

The imagined inner world of children, however, can go to depths which the outer world and architecture cannot match. A mat of 6 feet by 6 feet for a child can become a an entire city. Buildings, cars, roads, gardens or palaces- the world will have its own own set of rules, and both real and imagined objects. This ability to imagine goes even beyond architecture, but which architecture should try to facilitate.

School and Memory

School is inextricably linked with ‘memory’, of insignificant things that are remembered many years beyond school. Sometimes, a small ledge in a house becomes the most significant spot for children where they compete to balance on it, and this becomes a game. Small objects become objects of creativity and play. The memory of school also goes beyond the building itself to the journey leading to it especially if you walked to school. What stones you collected on the way, which streets you pass through, the sounds and the smells.

 

Transition with age

While it can be very exciting to design for young children with imagination and play as the focus, it also becomes important to remember how relationships, interests and intelligences change through the years of school.

According to a theory by psychologist Howard Garner, there are nine intelligences with kids have, such as music, mathematics, spatial, spiritual, linguistics. All of us are born with one or more of these, and as we grow, the intelligence which we are receptive to may change. For children, these changes through age.

The transition through age also leads to different kinds of school interactions and relationships, which intersect with architectural design.

Nursery School

In this stage, there is a strong energy. Children want to feel, to jump, to fall. We need to respond to that, make them do things and learn through that. Here, the teacher-child relation is also very intimate, you need to have a connection to be able to communicate. You sit on the floor, you use expressions and feel very close to the teacher.

Nursery school at the Ekya School, Bengaluru designed by Mindspace. Interactions are personal and intimate. 

Primary school

At this stage, the way of studying starts to change, you start playing less with sand and more with colours. The relationship with the teacher changes, it is no more as close and expressive. You like to display what you have done, show it to parents and friends and this becomes an important element in the classroom. Physical activity and group games start becoming important.

Group games, art and display at the Ekya School Bangalore

Middle School

At this stage, the curiosity becomes more analytical than spontaneous. There could be interest in science, experiments to see how things work. The games are also more competitive. The teacher student relationship becomes more distanced than younger years.

Secondary school/ high school

It is only at this stage that the children are more aware of the ‘spaces’ , while until now the memory is usually on details. Sports become more adventurous, and this is also a far more distanced teacher-student relationship. The energy level here reduces.

 

We tried representing these transitions graphically based on our observations as follows.

Communication initially is through feelings, and later becomes through languages. As you grown up, your ability to express through facial expression reduces and you become more diplomatic. You lose the excitement with colours, want your own space and privacy.

In a kindergarten school design project in Trichy by Mindspace, we attempted to design for different age groups in using a section where the height increases based on the age of children. The idea was to create a space where you learn by doing, feeling, and understanding the surroundings.

To make the scale relatable for different age groups, a wedge-shaped form was used both in plan and section, which creates both a cozy, intimate space for independent play of a small child and larger volumes for group activities with adults. Multiple eye levels were used with sloped roofs and sloped floors, so that all surfaces can be usable – not just the floor but also the walls and the roofs. Like a sloping roof in a traditional house, this can gives a sense of comfort because it comes low enough for a person to touch and feel it at the lowest part, even if it rises to a much higher level in other parts.

 

To develop a space where the children can be outdoors, but still under supervision, courtyards were introduced, as a place to be outdoors but with the secure feeling of being partly enclosed. In other parts, outdoor play areas gave scope for children to run free without boundaries. 

 There are also different kinds of needs and curiosities that have to be met in designing a space for children- and light was brought in to allow the young child to try and catch a ray of sunlight in their hands, for older children to find their own cozy nook for studying alone. 

Some of these ideas were also incorporated into our other school design projects including the Sreenidhi International School at Hyderabad and Ekya Schools in Bengaluru.

Ultimately, schools and spaces that children use stay in memory for a long time, and often shape the way you may like or dislike certain kind of spaces in adulthood. The small ledges, the colour of a wall, the shape of a window- all are often remembered for years as inseparable from the memories associated with that time. While designing spaces for children, architecture offers immense potential and freedom, which also needs to be accompanied by understandings and observations on how children use and experience space through the years.

All images and graphics are sourced from Mindspace’s archives unless otherwise mentioned.