Archinect - News

How Canadian designer Eric McMillan redefined the way we play through the Ontario Place Children's Village

2019-08-01T19:33:00-04:00

Watching the way children used his equipment, often in ways he could never have anticipated, made him more and more certain: play wasn’t a frivolous distraction from learning, but something essential to childhood and indeed humanity. [...] According to his design philosophy, each park wasn’t just a place to jump on a shockingly large air mattress. It was “a place where a child can ask questions of what it means to be human.”

Journalist Nicholas Hune-Brown profiles Canadian designer Eric McMillan, who started out his career as an exhibition designer and was then thrown into the spotlight after he designed the Ontario Place Children's Village in Toronto. Suddenly becoming the expert on children's design, McMillan incorporated elements that aimed to help kids learn through play — which includes helping create the world's first ball pit.

In the piece, McMillan looks back on those years — from the thought process behind the iconic Toronto playground, to how changing attitudes towards playgrounds led to the end of those glory years, to what he thinks should be done with the now-defunct site.

“The key was to build things that sparked interaction, between kids and the equipment, but especially between the kids themselves,” Hune-Brown writes in the piece.

The power of play, how childhood toys inspired architects and their designs

2019-04-08T20:14:00-04:00

Everyone can recall their favorite toy as a child. For some, these childhood toys inspired interests and passions that led to specific career pursuits as an adult. Thinking back on one's own experience with toys like LEGO and Lincoln Logs, these simple pieces of wood and plastic led to endless amounts of fun and creative possibility. As a child, I recall spending hours playing with Little Tykes Waffle Blocks and Playskool's colored wooden blocks.

1982 Vintage Playskool Colored Wood Blocks

Play-based learning, especially with blocks or other building-focused models, enhances a child's ability to problem solve and stimulate creative decision making. These simple, tactical objects allow for children to experience and understand the world around them, especially the built environment. Through stacking and connecting, these types of educational toys enable children to experience trial and error through forms of continuous self-assessment. The anticipation of stacking one more block on t...

A Brutal Youth: Memories of Growing Up in Brutalist Masterpeice Habitat 67

2017-05-02T13:30:00-04:00

“How do you live with all that cement,” my schoolmates would ask. “With delight” was the only answer. They understood once they visited.

Part childhood memoir, part ode to brutalism itself, this piece by Blake Gopnik touches on his experiences living in Habitat 67 while celebrating the return of a form that many openly reviled for decades, but have now gradually come to like, even treasure. (Of course, not all is well for brutalist forms: Tadao Ando's Piccadilly Gardens in England is slated to be demolished after vigorous complaint by local residents.) However, those buildings that have survived the wave of demolitions are being increasingly valued for their spartan, bulky beauty: Canada's government is issuing a stamp celebrating the 50th birthday of Habitat 67, and oddly enough tours of the specific apartment Gopnik used to live in will be offered to the public. As Gopnik writes:

Habitat’s 158 apartments fill 365 cast-concrete boxes, piled 11 stories high in a madcap mess of cantilevers and bridges and perilous open spaces — like (guess what) a stack of children’s blocks. For sheer sensory excitement, Habitat could ...

These super-rich parents are building bespoke houses to homeschool their children

2016-02-19T17:46:00-05:00

The [Taylor] family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom. [...] “When you do a house from the ground up, you do it for how your family lives. Home schooling for us is a lifestyle”

More at the intersection of space and education:

Designing a transparent chair for toy storage

2016-02-17T17:05:00-05:00

The "Mom" chair is a kid-sized acrylic seat with an opening on top where kids can drop their toys. It makes the dreaded toy clean-up exceedingly simple—and looks damn good to boot—but the true genius is in its transparency. Unlike opaque storage systems, toys can be easily spotted and dug out from within its clear walls.

Anyone who has lived through the chaos of a child playing (the point of which can seem to be to maximally distribute their toys across a given floor area) will appreciate this inventive, highly functional design by Carlo Contin:

For more of Furniture February:

Architecture for All Ages: The top “youth-inspired” projects of 2014

2014-12-29T13:00:00-05:00

Curiosity is a driving force in architecture, design, and just about every creative field. Whether it was through collaborative projects in grade school, reading comic books, or sitting in a corner doodling away, it's not unusual for creative practitioners to say their interests were formed during their childhood and teenage years, if not somehow reaffirmed later in life.

Below is a loosely threaded list of end-of-the-year picks (in no particular order) of fun and educational projects that focus on youth participation as well as projects that echo childhood nostalgia and curiosity. Just like the kid who always asks "Why?", these fun uplifting projects are a reminder that inquisitiveness should never run dry and, regardless of age, learning never stops.

Never Too Young; 15 Librarian-Recommended Architecture Books for Young Children ↓

The winning narratives of the first Fairy Tales Architecture Competition ↓

"Constructing Holden Caulfield": Learning to build character through literary arc...

Finding playground potential in the Energy Carousel in Dordrecht

2014-03-31T15:08:00-04:00

For a kid, a lifesize light-up spinning top that you can play in right in your neighborhood sounds like a dream come true -- and such is the case in Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

The Energy Carousel by Madrid-based firm Ecosistema Urbano is a play structure that is both engaging and educational. As kids grab onto one of the structure's hanging ropes, the kinetic energy released by their movements is stored in a battery, which later serves as supply to light up the structure at night. The carousel's LED lights shine in various colors depending on how much energy was stored during that day.

The Energy Carousel was one of the winning designs in a 2010 invited competition by Carve, an Amsterdam design group that specializes in developing and engineering public spaces for children. Carve asked 10 European firms to design a multi-age sustainable "unconventional play object" to complete the Governeursplein public square in Dordrecht.

Since then, it seems the Energy Carousel has provided whirls ...

"A Dolls’ House" auction raises nearly £90,000 for KIDS charity in London

2013-11-14T13:40:00-05:00

The Cathedral Group's A Dolls' House raised close to £90,000 at the end of the live auction event on Nov. 11 at Bonhams in London. The project invited 20 well-known UK architects, who collaborated with artists and other designers, to create their own doll houses with the goal to raise £100,000 for the KIDS charity. Architects included Adjaye Associates, FAT, MAKE, Zaha Hadid Architects, Coffey Architects, and Studio Egret West.

The doll houses were then auctioned for online from September to noon on Nov. 11, and finally at the live auction event that evening. To read more on the project, click here.

Here's a part of the Cathedral Groups press release on the event:

"The stylish event saw over 400 guests come together to celebrate and bid on the selection of dolls’ houses, including models by Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye. The highest bid of the evening was for Zaha Hadids’ dolls’ house, ‘This must be the place’ reaching an impressive £14,000.

Not far behind was the 1.5m hi...

Doll houses designed by 20 big-name architects such as Adjaye, Zaha, DRMM, FAT, Make to be auctioned for KIDS charity in November

2013-10-09T17:52:00-04:00

A Dolls' House, a project by Cathedral Group, adds a contemporary twist to a childhood pastime. The UK developer rounded up 20 big-name UK architecture firms -- like Adjaye Associates, Zaha Hadid Architects, Coffey Architects, dRMM, Duggan Morris, FAT, MAKE, and Studio Egret West -- in collaboration with designers and artists to have each of them create their own modern version of a doll house that will be auctioned in November to raise £100,000 for KIDS, a charity that supports disabled children, young people, and their families throughout England. The doll houses will also be presented and exhibited at Bonhams before they are auctioned at an evening event on November 11.

Aside from showing off the personal visions of each design team, these one-of-a-kind doll houses include at least one element designed specifically as a learning aid for children with a disability.

Among the list of well-established names and their reinvented doll houses include MAKE Architects whose "Jigsaw ...

Sticks and stones: can architects be built in the classroom?

2011-04-21T16:37:09-04:00

... one of the big problems in Britain – a country infamous for its visual illiteracy, or so say outsiders – is that architecture isn't taught to children, not much in the home, and much less at school. What an all-embracing discipline it is, though, for teachers and pupils alike: a fusion of art, maths, geometry, geography, physics, technology, politics, economics and environmental concerns.

The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey discusses the architectural education, or lack thereof, in the British early childhood education system.

I honestly don’t think that I would have been an artist had I not lived in the house.

2011-04-12T22:17:36-04:00

"There’s not one bit of drywall or plasterboard or anything like that, so everything has a material that is itself."

Jen Graves interviews artist Leo Berk, who claims his childhood home, the Ruth Berk house by "not-quite-legitimate architect, in a good way, Bruce Goff", was the formative experience that made him become an artist.