News In Brief

MAD skills

In 2017, MAD Architects was commissioned to design a kindergarten next to a senior citizens’ apartment block in Beijing, China, reflecting the client’s ethos of “intergenerational integration” that blends pre-school education and care of the elderly. “When I looked back at my own kindergarten years, and even the ones I saw after I grew up, I always wondered what it is that kids long for the most,” says MAD Architects’ founder, Ma Yansong. “Perhaps it is freedom and love. A kindergarten doesn’t always have to offer complex hardware or fixtures, but it must always make kids feel freedom and love – something that leads them to endless possibilities.” At MAD’s YueCheng Courtyard Kindergarten in Beijing, this comes in the form of a beautiful, undulating rooftop playground wrapped around courtyards and towering trees. Look out for a full report on this extraordinary building in the next issue of Planning Learning Spaces magazine.

LearnLife launches pop-up classrooms

LearnLife, the global community of education innovators, have unveiled pop-up modules that enable learning to happen anywhere, at minimal cost while treading as lightly as possible on the earth. “It’s an infrastructure that can be multiplied, added on and plugged into existing schools or any outdoor space,” explains LearnLife Learning Space Architect, Solange Espoille. Designed using Passivhaus principles, these wooden, Nearly Zero Emission Buildings (NZEB) offer energy savings of up to 90 per cent compared to conventional buildings and can be constructed locally using a design process simplified through digitalisation. The first popup module will be built in Spain in spring 2021.

Seats for better learning (that’s the bottom line)

We help educators make learning spaces better.

For example, we know that the angle between your legs and torso should be between 110° and 120° so as not to constrain the vital organs in your lower body and allow oxygenated blood to get to your brain unhindered. It’s this sort of data that informs our designs: so what we do can positively impact cognition. For more examples, please visit our website.