FIRST YEAR Playful Thresholds
Kristina Hertel, Michele Roelofsma, Reem Charif, Alan Chandler, Charlotte Harris, Toshiya Kogawa, Renee Tobe, Janet Insull
Playing with buildings This year, First Year Architecture was invited to collaborate with the V&A Museum of Childhood on a live project, which was focused on the theme ‘playful learning’. Students designed and constructed a series of 1:1 prototypes that form the exhibition “Playing with Buildings” that opened at the Museum in February this year. This exhibition will run in the front room gallery of the Museum in Bethnal Green until March 2020. Spaces for Playful Learning continued in term 2 as the overall theme for this year’s studies, with Bethnal Green the site for the main design project.
to schools and educational spaces in both cities. In Amsterdam, Year 1 visited Hermann Hertzberger’s Apollo School, an outstanding example of a design that employs the concept of inhabited thresholds.
An exploration of playful thresholds The project started with a series of spatial explorations of thresholds; between bodies, between bodies and space. This extended into investigating the public galleries of the museum through a workshop with a performance artist, in which students tested threshold conditions with their own bodies. These physical sketches defined sites for intervention and inspired the designs for new threshold spaces for the museum that students subsequently constructed as prototypes at scale 1:1.
Extended space for playful learning Inspired by the 1:1 prototypes, the ambition of term 2’s design project was to erode existing boundaries and the public conception and experience of the museum as an institution for learning. Students worked on one of three sites with differing proximity to the Museum of Childhood, designing a space for playful learning that mediates spatially and programmatically between the museum, and the local and wider community.
‘Schools are like cities’ (H. Hertzberger) Conversations and studies around the theme of thresholds and learning spaces were expanded in the field trips to London and Amsterdam, with visits
LONDON & WUPPERTAL, GERMANY
Client study After completing the installation of the exhibition at the V&A in early February, students facilitated 3 workshops with local primary schools, held at the museum, with the school pupils scrutinising, testing and expanding the students’ design ideas. This was an opportunity for them to directly engage with, and observe, their client for their forthcoming main design project.
