2015 08 31 kids 01 by Rachel Mei-Lan Tan

KIDS

RACHEL MEI-LAN TAN

KIDS WEEK 01 20/08/2015

00 A BULLDOZER DESTROYED MY PLAY AREA 01 ANOMALIES 02 NEW CENTURY, NEW CHILD 03 MoMa, CREATIVE PLAYTHINGS 04 OBSESSION, HOW TO MAKE MY CHILD SMART 05 TOYS, CHILDREN “WORKING” 06 SCALE 07 SCHOOLS 08 CHILDRENS GEOGRAPHIES 09 GARDEN 10 SURFACE

New Century, New Child EDUCATION AT THE ELEMENTAL AGE BECAUSE CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE Children have a place, beyond schools and playgrounds. They are an unfixed concept that is constantly being redefined, as the spaces they require morph in prediction. As we enter the 21st century the modern child is re-visited from the untouched studies of the postwar period. Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it in fact during childhood that we, at the basic level, organize most knowledge?

As a social category, the generation of childhood is often overlooked in regards to the built environment. Pre-schools, elementary schools, daycare centers, and playgrounds are places in which both the child and adult co-exist. The heightened focus on children resulting from the “baby boom” - the dramatic rise in the US birthrate from 1946-1964 stimulated a national debate over child rearing, encouraged sharp public interest in education, and sparked unprecedented spending on children. In addition to buying new parenting guides and magazines advocating techniques for creating a healthy personality, postwar parents spent record sums on amusements. Toys such as building blocks, beads, wooden trains and cars, and peg boards became standard equipment in the postwar playroom and schoolroom of the young middle-class child. Although seeminly innocent objects, many ‘educaational” toys - toys inteded to teach physcial skills or develop cognitive abilities - were embedded in changing ideas bout education, postwar

discussions about national image, and new research on the origins of social signficiaance in creativity. As a result , maany “educational” toys achieved new recognition, not only for their pedagogical qualities but also for their design and promises to stimulate invention. While the word CREATIVITY has connotations of deception, its literal meaning (forming making inventing0 is relatively neautrial. The term as it was applied to children acquired utopian association of beginning anew from a pure source. In looking at the way that the idea of creativity permeated the language of advice writers and strategies of toys desgners and manufacturers.

It is within this century that learning for a child has

MoMa Creative Playthings 1949 HOUSE IN THE MUSEUM GARDEN AN EXHIBIT ON THE HOME INCLUDED A CHILDREN’S PLAYROOM

With the idealized three bedroom home of a typical American family on display in the MoMa courtyard by Marcel Breuer, the image of modern domesticity on view showed how art and practicality could be considered synonymous. Morevoer, it stressed that spaces and things designed for children were central to the postwar discourse on housing and family life. Furnished with Eames plywood chairs and Eero Saarinen’s fiberglass womb chair, the house was fitted with a kitchen that allowed for surveillaNce of other areas, especially the playroom. While the practicality of the children’s furnishings were central to the concept of a middle-class house, the brightly colored aesthetic of the furnishings reinforced the idea that this was a modernist project. The playroom

consisted of hollow blocks which could be made into furniture and still remian toys. The concern with design around children transformed into an aspiration to reform children’s toys, furniture, and playgrounds. Stimulated by excercise and aesthetic fantasy, Egon Moeller Nielsen began to design Big playgrounds for good design and play with large scale objects. The large scale evocation of the free forms and enhanced safety led his playgrounds to success. These explorations allowed children visitors to test the designs. All entries relied on a signle unit that could be repeated to create a striking visual environment, and emphaasized how children could explore shapes and textures while creting their own fantasy

scenarious in the recessed and hidden spaces. The designs suggested that a childs imagination might achieve new freedom when excercised in context with the childs body. Behind this the theory of abstraction could

CHARLES AND RAY EAMES : EDUCATIONAL THROUGH DISCOVERY

EAMES TOY’S MARRIED DESIGN AND MODERNIST AESTHETICS TO WHAT THEY CONSIDERED THE CHILD’S OWN PLAY INSTINCTS. OFTEN THEY INCLUDED COMPLICATED INSTRUCTION FOR BUILDING IMPLYING THAT THEY SAW CHILDREN AS DESIGNERS ARRANGEMENT AND BALANCE

EGON MOLLER NIELSON : CREATIVE PLAY THINGS FOR MoMa

BIG FOR GOOD DESIGN PLAY LARGE OBJECTS stimulated excercise and aesthetic FANTASY INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SPACE

VIRGINIA DORTCH D’ORAZIO : FANTASTIC VILLAGE

FOUR CONCRETE PLAYHOUSES

SIDNEY GORDON : TUNNEL MAZE

KING OF THE MOUNTAIN YOUNGER CHILDREN RUN UP THE MOUNTAIN.... SLIDE DOWN THE VALLEY...CRAWL IN AND OUT THE CAVES... BRIDGELIKE FORMS THAT COULD BE STAGGERED IN AN UNDULATING LANDSCAPE OFFERS PLACES TO CRAWL AND HIDE

ROBERT J. GARGIULE : STALAGMITE CAVE

SPOOL SHAPED UPRIGHT FORMS SERVING AS LOW TABLES OR NARROW HIDING SPACES

*Obsessions* How to Make them Smart AN INFLATED MARKET HAS RISEN WHERE CLASSES, TOYS, FURNITURE ARE BEING CONSUMED AT A MASSIVE RATE Parents are spending over 78 million dollars on luxury toys and items for their children under the guisse of guiding their children to develop skills and brain functions at their most vital aages. Marketed as “cardboard for geniuses” If this market can reach the scale of toys - furniture and books, it can extend further into the actual learning environment, home, and playground. The typologies of these structures need to be examined. Faith in objects to teach lessons is a continuing motivator of today’s toy market. Creativity and imagination are the ubiquitos promoses of a large number of toys on the market today. Yet - “we have little compelling evvidence of a connection between toys,. all by themselves, and achievement....” What is more obvious is that, since the appearnace of toys in the seventeenth century, we have steadily and progressively developed a belief that there is a connection between toys and achievement” In 1962 two University of Chicago professors, Jacob W. Getzels and Philip W. Jackson, published an important study on the relationship between creativity and intelligence. Working with students

TOYS : WOOD BLOCKS, FOLDED PAPER, PUZZLES, ROCKING HORSE, TOTEMS

FURNITURE : MODULAR, DUAL FUNCTIONS, REFERENTIAL, INTERACTIVE

DEMOUNTAABLE SHELTERS - PLAYSPACES

PLAYSPACES EDUCATIONAL THROUGH DISCOVERY

Toys “Children Working” YOUNG CHILDREN DON’T NEED GADGETS, THEIR IMAGINATIONS ARE ENOUGH

The Montessori school has established a system where they thoughtfully refer to what we commonly know as ‘play’ to be ‘work.’ When the children are working they are handling real tasks with real tools, all by themselves. The

Objects have always played a role in educating children, but the concept of an educational device or toy to instill specific lessons in only about three hundred years old. While there is evidence of toys from antiquity and the Middle Ages, the changing use of the word TOY has been used as evidence that the modern idea of a child’s plaything emerged in the early modern period. Before the middle eighteenth century, TOY meant a trifle or petty commodity. One of the most celebrated examples

of deliberately educational toy is the set of alphabet blocks that English Philosepher John Locke developed for teaching literacy in the late seventheenth century. By 1950 Johan Huizinga in his influential study HOMO LUDENS established that play had an important social and spiritual function int he promotion of art and culture. The Romantic trope of the child as an innocent “primitive” endowed with innate creativity has has enduring appeal. Artists especially have perceived children’s creations as models of the authentically pure and vital. Friedrich and Maria Montessori each developed teaching objects as part of

a particular ingegrated curriculum. Froebel’s program of graduated tasks of arranging spheres, blocks, paper, and other materials was developed from the Enlightenment legacy of understanding the forces of nature thorugh experimenation but was joined to a Romantic quest for spiritual harmony with God, nature, and humanity.

and real tools (such as knives and scissors) as well as colored rods, counting beads, letters, and sand paper taught concrete lessons and awaked a child’s sensory faculties.

His “gifts” and “occupations” (he did not use the term TOYS) were symbolic elements that formed part of a complete system.

“Learning while plaaying, an idea and an idea”

Froebel’s Kindergarten (literally a children’s garden) had wideswpread influence in late nineteenth century America. Reformers such as Elizabeth Peabody advocated the kindergarten model for all children, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, as means of improving society through the training of both children and their mothers. For Montessori, objects coul teach real skills as well as abstract values. In addition to teaching selfdiscipline and self-reliance through cooking, washing, and cleaning, the Montessori method included principles of mathetmatics, writing, and color theory Children size furniture and small scale glasses, ceramic dishes,

Toys emphasized manual coordiation and encouraged the visual practice of arranging shapes and creating lines.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of developmental stages and a child’s desire for handson expereintial learning was known among prewar American nursery school teachers, but it became widely adopted in postwar pedagogy, and fit neatly with educational toy manufacturs’ aim to sell toys continuosly during infancy and youth. The Montessori ideas were revived in the 1960s.

Scale CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES

SIDNEY GORDON : TUNNEL MAZE

Scale is not limited to the toys and furniture.

ROBERT J. GARGIULE : STALAGMITE CAVE

Schools Innovated Learning HOW THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT CAN BE IMPROVED SCHOOLS ARE OVERLOOKED - LEARNING BOX WITH TEACHER IN FRONT SCHOOL BUILDING WITH A DESIGN BASED ON CHILDRENS OBSERVED ACTIONS WHICH SUPPORT THEIR ACTIVITIES PERCEPTUAL SENSITIVITY TO QUALITY OF LIGHT, COLOR, TEXTURES, SOUND AND COMFORTABLE ATMOSPEHRE DATA DEFINED DESIGN CRIDTERIA,

It is within this century that learning for a child has

Children’s Geographies

STUDIES ON A CHILDS LIFE, DWELLING, WORK, RECREATION, TRANSPORTATION. RESEARCH FOCUSED ON THE DESIGN OF A TOILET AND BATHROOM - WHICH WERE SEPERATED SO CHILDREN COULD ENJOY A LONG BATH.

The removala of a basketball court can cause an elevated gang violence due to removing the activity for youths, no facilities existed for youth, and within years gang violence spurts. A bulldozer had destroyed our play area - What are your rules ? Lack of a space to play Such needs for Pop Up projects become constraining and “Tumblr Friendly” Much of the work to a style measured in thin rustic novelty of pop-up DIY like production: chipboard, shipping containers, bare bricks, spontaneous installation and time limited demountability. Thus, in additoin to the work being fraamed as insignificant, its aesthetic is defined largely by the project’s need to communicate its temporary nature, as well as salability - media attention being a critical

component of any of these projects’ success With all of this true, and much of it problematic, what shoudl really resonate is that this architecture that makes too many excuses for itself so that it may come into being. Conflating promises of low costs, reduced new material use, (sometimes outlandish) claims about technical performance, eyecatching, energetic aesthetic, overlaid with programmatic aaccommodation as much as invetion, the work is so busy answering to all the charged it has given itselt that it often cannot make an intimate connection with the subject or viewer. It has too much on the surface to allow for introspection or discovery; its effects are never subtle.

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Surface AN OPERATION OF BUILT GEOGRPAPHY THAT IS ACCESSED WITHIN THE URBAN FABRIC VERTICALLY

Spiritual presences, if not sensed and acted upon recede into miasmic clouds or linger like background radioactivity as a spiritual underlay, something like aa shorud or a quasi-sacred field condition beneath the everyday. To decode this hidden stratum, today’s urban shaman moves through the city’s forest of new signs and ancient resonances. Incantation and sacred speech have always been part of cosmopolitism, and in today’s multi-faith urbanism the recent transformations in urban sacred space are differntially perceived and acted upon in recursive spaces. THe soft and fuzzy logic of the sacred, the duplicity of street magic, and the curiosity of sympaathetic magic are still laatent in many forms of urbanism. Aspirants, believers, holy men, soothsayers, clairvoyants, oracles, herbalists, icon merchaants, psychic surgeons, and other can be found in many of the public sapces of the world, and these subjectivities undulate in the subtle infrastructure supporting Magical Urbanism.

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MATERIAL

YOUNG CHILDREN DON’T NEED GADGETS, THEIR IMAGINATIONS ARE ENOUGH

Plastic, the quintessential postwar material, had been adopted for the production of toys even before the war. It would become on of the most important materials in postwar toy production. Yet in educational rhetoric of the era, plain wooden toys were marketed as solid unpretentious reminders of simpler times of the past and as seemingly blank objects upon which children’s imagination could be given free reign. This prefernce for wood remained laden with vitalist association of handicraft - even if toys were mass produced. The evocation of craftsmanship, and sophisticated design was appealing in Scandinavian furniture fo rits materials (chiefly oak and teak. “A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of

its being an idea material because of its firmness and its softness , and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all forms, which is supports, the wounding quality of angeles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal....It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not server the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. “ -- Rolan Barthes, TOYS, in Mythologies.

Vitali’s toys reinforced the association between visual abstraction, tactile appeal, and imaginative development. By eliminating details, such as facial features, doors, or seperate parts, Vitali’s

design put the visual and intellectual emphasis on the form and the natural grain of the wood, reinforcing the company’s idea os freeing the child’s imagination through abstraction. In 1966 a writer for PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE theorized that toys might affect the next generation of professional and clients, asking. “Is creativity in these matters being sufficiently developed int he important and impressionable years, no matter what the future occupation of the child? Is sensitivity to material, form, structure, connection,a nd modularity a by product of these toys? The answer: Too many toys are designed as if for adults, with diretions to match, too restrained, too tidy, too down to earth for a child’s imagination. Too many toys are the product of a designer whose reined-in imagination is harnessed to the pursuit of a literalness that will always outrun him. The last things a child needs in a toy is utter realism. But the highly competitive market maakes a manufacter aim for a first-impression exterior, often to the neglect of long-term deligh and creative growth.

Gardens HOW

Assumptions How to collect data - how to shape architecture for childrens nneds. Design data can be gathered by observing children as they respond to environments. How do we engage children into the design dialogue, their shared creativity to strengthen the community.

Children.... behave themselves better when actively and constructively engaged are encouraged to think for themselves highly creative when left to their own devices, yet at the same time susceptible to imitation are unique, and a friendly competiteness develops learn while they play, hands on require personal space and personal belongings are designers

Children have a place, beyond schools and playgrounds. They are an unfixed concept that is constantly being redefined, as the spaces they require morph in prediction. As we enter the 21st century the modern child is re-visited from the untouched studies of the postwar period. Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it in fact during childhood that we, at the basic level, organize most knowledge?

A bulldozer destroyed our play area DISCIPLINING THE URBAN FABRIC PLACING THE CHILD As children endouvour to weave themselves into the fabric of an adult world, the same built environment and space, they both use and perceive the shared spaces in a way much different to adults. How can we foster a better sense of ownership and belonging of place for the child while allowing them to claim their own spaces and determine their own activities, rather than conforming to adult designated sites of play

Just as we carry our daily lives from point to point destinations, home > work > movies > grocery stores > home, children follow a similar pattern. How can we allow them to engender a sense of ownership and belonging by provision of a child centered landscape. To also encompass discovery and encourage children to learn independence and gain knowledge through exploration. Modern urban fabrics

EGON MOLLER NIELSON : CREATIVE PLAY THINGS FOR MoMa

expanded beyond their textbooks. It extends to the sole question of ‘How to make your child smart’ -- classical music, primary colors, and stimulating their minds with an endless amount of marketing for toys and decor. With such excuberant and forward minded thinking parents the opportunity arises to intervene in our current introspection of the child. Personal customization has become a standard in modern day living, and educational spaces especially should be tailored towards the modern child. To establish flexibility in the way they learn, not just through textbooks, but through intervention. The montessori schools being the most well established network for ‘alternative’ learning have intuitively designed their educational system to best fit the development of the child as they age.

BIG FOR GOOD DESIGN PLAY LARGE OBJECTS stimulated excercise and aesthetic FANTASY INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SPACE