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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.” — The Local
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
“How do you live with all that cement,” my schoolmates would ask. “With delight” was the only answer. They understood once they visited. — The New York Times
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... View full entry
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”
— wsj.com
More at the intersection of space and education:Are English universities picking up "American habits" as campus construction booms?Building Design from the Inside Out: RISD’s Interior Architecture departmentChinese Colleges Are Trying to Look Like the Ivy LeagueTod Williams Billie Tsien... View full entry
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. — Fast Co Design
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: "Very refined; it’s like a jewel"... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
... 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. — guardian.co.uk
The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey discusses the architectural education, or lack thereof, in the British early childhood education system. View full entry
"There’s not one bit of drywall or plasterboard or anything like that, so everything has a material that is itself." — When A Building Makes You Who You Are: Jen Graves
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. View full entry
