Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: the photo-sharing site set the agenda at this year’s Milan design week and hints at how technology will transform the way we experience the world, says Marcus Fairs, who also shares a selection of his own Instagram images from the week (+ slideshow).

I was attending a talk in Milan the other day and I noticed that one of the panelists was far more interested in his iPhone than the discussion. The girl sitting next to me in the audience was similarly preoccupied. Then I realised what was going on: the guy was Instagramming a picture of the girl, who had just Instagrammed one of him.

For me, the star of Milan this year was Instagram. It was the lens though which I experienced the week: it was a kind of parallel digital version of my real-world experience.

Instagram is how I kept up with what friends were doing in Milan, and was a key source of research for what I should see. It’s how I found out about the things I’d missed. I know plenty of other people who said the same.

It was my preferred method of documenting my own experiences at the fair this year. And when a journalist from La Repubblica called to interview me about my Salone highlights, her first question was “What was your favourite Instagram moment?”

Instagram is how I found out that Massimo Morozzi had died. A few years ago news like that would have spread on Twitter, but this year the design cognoscenti have switched to the photo-sharing service.

An Instagrammed Milan is very different from a tweeted Milan. Twitter helps news and gossip to spread like wildfire; it’s a verbal medium that encourages debate. During the Salone del Mobile in 2011, journalists converged on Twitter to share information and opinions on the dark side of the industry, creating the biggest talking point of the week that year.

But Instagram is a purely visual medium that does not criticise but instead, through its filtered trickery, burnishes. It’s not a surprise that designers, who collectively aspire to create a more beautiful world (and were largely silent during the 2011 twitterstorm), have embraced it too.

This wasn’t a vintage Salone in terms of talking points and there appeared to be little consensus among Intagrammers as to the outstanding shows. Rather the city itself – and particularly its more photogenic venues – became the stars. The breezily atmospheric Palazzo Clerici in Brera; the eccentric Spazio Rosanna Orlandi; the breathtaking Villa Necchi Campiglio; the charming pop-up street cafes and garden bars in Ventura Lambrate; the surreal Fornasetti house. Under a benevolent sun, it felt more like a sprawling lifestyle festival than a design fair.

Instagram feeds are highly personal, highly curated visual diaries of an individual’s aesthetic interaction with a place. The filters and cropping tools allow you to achieve visual perfection within a little square frame, creating an idealised world free of the clutter and noise of the real world.

My own Milan Instagram diary is low on design but high on portraits of people I’ve met, dinners I’ve attended and incidental tableaux from my meanderings around the city. Trawling through my feed will no doubt strongly influence my memories of the week. It’s an airbrushed digital travelogue that paints both the city and my interaction with it in a flattering light.

Instagram is a powerful arbiter of taste because it favours certain aesthetic experiences over others. It likes a strong, colourful form against a plain background; it loves translucency and diffraction; it adores sunsets. I wouldn’t be surprised if brands soon start to rethink their presentation strategies to enhance the Instagrammability of their stands.

Instagram also favours eclecticism: a typical fairgoer’s feed will feature a product followed by a selfie followed by a street scene followed by their lunch. Design has existed in a bubble of its own for decades: to walk round a design fair or flick through a design magazine is to see an aesthetic monoculture. But Instagram reveals how the design world intersects with other realities, and shows them to be just as beautiful.

Instagram is just a foretaste of the way we will use digital technology to experience events like the Salone del Mobile in future. Capturing technologies like 360-degree video – which records everything in all directions – allows the creation of convincing digital replicas of physical spaces.

And display technologies like Google Glass, augmented reality and virtual reality mean that we will be able to access additional layers of information as we move around an event, or even experience it without being there. One day the Salone del Mobile could be hosted in a huge server farm, accessible only through a virtual reality headset.

These technologies also allow users to inhabit enhanced, personalised worlds – or entirely artificial worlds – that can be designed around their preferences, edited on the move, Instagram-style, and filed for future enjoyment. Bored by the colour of your kitchen? Use a real-time filter to change it. Walk to work too drab? Brighten it up, adjust the contrast, cut and paste some sights from your last holiday.

To an extent we already inhabit a parallel space: time spent on Instagram, Twitter or other social media is time spent in a virtual community rather than the real world. The cliche of the person so entranced by their iPhone that they notice nothing of their physical surroundings is just the beginning of the migration towards parallel digital worlds that are as convincing as the real one.

Somebody will have to design these worlds but it is astonishing how little attention designers and the design industry is paying to this potential. In Milan this year only Moooi dared dip their toes into the water, presenting an online 360-degree digital walkthrough that allowed people who were not in the city to experience their show.

Elsewhere, Joseph Grima’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) project harvested images from Instagram, reactions from Twitter and combined them with robot-generated transcripts of discussions. It treated the fair as a giant data-generating event and used algorithms instead of journalists to decide what to publish.

Apart from those two examples, and a smattering of other projects, this year’s fair was largely a tech-free zone. The lack of innovative uses of technology at the fair was the elephant in the room. This is an extraordinary missed opportunity for an industry that needs to embrace technology if it is to have a future.

The post “The star of Milan this year
was Instagram” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: a campaign to protect London’s skyline and the UK government’s first review into the state of architecture both point to the same thing: Britain’s approach to building is broken, says Sam Jacob.

After a year of consultation, the Farrell Review has been published. Commissioned by the Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture, communications and creative industries, its brief was to provide a wide ranging review of the role of architecture and the built environment in the UK.

The same week saw the launch of the Skyline campaign backed by New London Architecture and The Observer calling for a review of the glassy forest of tall buildings rising up in London right now, for a commission into tall buildings. Of course, all these tall buildings have already sailed through planning – or, as in Convoys Wharf this week, have been waived through by Boris Johnson himself as though he was directing one of his clunky retro-kitsch Routemasters into a parking spot.

Both the Farrell Review and the Skyline campaign point to a self evident truth: there’s something wrong with the UK’s approach to the built environment. Both talk about that thing they call “design quality” and the general lack of it in the cities around us.

It is absolutely beyond belief how bad so much of British architecture and development is. And the Farrell review is right – this is really remarkable given we have some incredible architectural talent here in the UK. Often though, this talent is building elsewhere. More often, sadly, it’s not building at all.

There’s no doubt given the right combination of client and designer we are more than capable of sorting out the niceties of architectural design. All it takes, in the words of the song, is a little more understanding between the two worlds. (If you are a client with aspiration but little knowledge of architects please do give me a call and I can help match you to some fantastic architects.)

The Skyline campaign is right too: some of those towers are right stinkers. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Look around the country and it’s frankly shameful what passes for architecture. But those responsible – the architects, clients and planning officers delivering this awful stuff – seem immune from their crimes against humanity and civility. In fact rather than suffering any crippling shame they seem to go from strength to strength.

Why? Because it is not “good” projects that are significant for a career in the built environment, it’s evidence of having delivered things with as little pain as possible. And as we know, it’s far easier to do something poor to middling than it is to do something good. In other words, hiring and procurement is tipped to actively reward poor to middling work. And, armed with a PR budget, its fairly easy to be artificially hoisted into industry press coverage, seats on panels, win awards and otherwise gloss you with an apparent air of respectability.

The Farrell Review gives us 60 “detailed” recommendations to improve architecture. Amongst them are some very good ones. But with that many recommendations I wouldn’t blame Vaizey for walking dizzily away. Whoever heard of the 60 Commandments or the 60 step programme?

So let me re-edit the report. I’ll ruthlessly strike out the autobiographic background (why are architects incapable of describing the world without recourse to themselves?), the self promotion of the panels’ interests (why can’t they leave their own agendas at home for once?) and ruthlessly redline the well-meaning but secondary issues (all fine, but not really key). And I’ll underline its main point in neon magenta highlighter.

This Jacob/Farrell Review would start, like Jay-Z almost did: “we’ve got 99 problems but architecture ain’t one.”

In other words: it’s planning, stupid.

However many “good” buildings we might produce, it’s the overall vision that’s conspicuously missing from our approach to the built environment. Things won’t get better without it.

We don’t really have to look that far to see that planning can play a central role in the making of British life.

From the New Towns act in 1946 to Milton Keynes in the 70s, Britain saw an incredible combination of practicality and imagination. It was a bureaucratic and technocratic vision that rolled up its sleeves and got stuff done. It was head-in-the-clouds visionary and down-and-dirty at the same time. It was a very British form of planning.

For this brief period – especially the twenty-year period of the Mark II New Towns – something remarkable happened. It happened not because of architects but because of cross-party support with long-term planning. Because, in other words, of a shared, popular desire. It was powered by the dual fuel of central government and semi-autonomous bodies. Yet remarkably it gave architecture the freedom to develop real visions: from futuristic citadel megastructures to diffuse bucolic re-imaginings of Los Angeles.

Planning was popular and the promise of what peacetime planning might achieve was part of wartime propaganda. It was the central plank of election manifestos. It was the subject of Hayward Art Gallery shows. Special issues of general interest magazines were dedicated to super-experimental ideas about planning.

But the privatisation of planning and architecture post 1979 changed the way we could think about Britain. Depleted of their once legion architectural staff and stripped of their own powers to build, local authorities can now do little more than wait for the private sector to approach them, like the protagonist of a Jane Austin novel at a dance.

Exposed to the fluctuations of short-term politics and markets, the private sector remains risk averse and wedded to tried and tested formulae.

This inevitably results in the piecemeal, fragmented approach that characterises our current approach to the built environment. Rather than thinking, planning became a weird ritualised dance involving alternating and choreographed begging and bullying between the private and public sectors.

Just look – as the Farrell Review does in a surprisingly interesting flow chart – at the history of governmental relationship to architecture. Multi-various ministries and departments have held multi-various briefs in the post-war period. Currently architecture sits, bizarrely, within the ministerial portfolio of Media, Culture and Sport.

It can’t be sport or media, so that must mean it’s culture. The kind of ‘culcha’ that you hear about on Radio Four, the kind of culture that you do at the weekends and you list as a hobby on your dating profile. But architecture is only culture in the anthropological sense: as the total sum of a civilisation. Art for sure, but everything else too: economics, society, politics, power.

What’s worrying is that even when Britain’s visionary planning past is invoked by government or clients it’s invoked in a nonsensical way. Just for everyone’s attention:

• A Garden City doesn’t just mean a few more trees.
• You can’t call any old spec housing development a New Town.

Both these terms are specific. They describe real moments of innovative, world leading, creativity and imagination applied to the built environment.

Both Garden Cities and the many flavours of New Town emerged as urgent desires for reform. They arose as responses to the problems of the industrial city and to the destruction of war.

There’s little doubt that we are in an equivalent kind of crisis where society is being rapidly reshaped by forces beyond our control. Reading the Farrell Report or the Skyline campaign, it’s hard to feel an equivalent sense of urgency despite the daily national coverage of the crisis in our contemporary cities.

The flows and eddies of global capital are having a dramatic effect on the landscape of Britain. This is not an issue about design quality. It involves thinking at a grand, totalising scale and developing that vision into the built reality of a place.

So, a big yes to the Farrell Review’s recommendation for a government architect. But what Britain really needs is a minister of spatial planning.

Someone whose brief is to think strategically about the design of the country. To join up the scattered fragments of HS2, Crossrail, Ebbfleet and Thamesmead, airports, tall buildings, taxation of empty properties, windfarms, help to buy and every other large scale scheme and issue that’s either on site, on the drawing board or on the horizon.

Even more important, their role would be to establish the narrative within which decisions could be made. A joined up narrative that the entire nation, not just government departments, might be able not just to participate in but get behind and believe in. A vision, a drawing even, of the possible future Britains we could chose to build.

Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association, and edits Strange Harvest.

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architecture ain’t one” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: as the market for design education explodes and schools struggle to keep up, we need to work out what a designer actually is and what they need to learn says Lucas Verweij.

Design has expanded in all imaginable directions, but the world of education doesn’t know how to respond to the new situation. What on earth should you teach future designers? For what profession are we actually educating them? Will they be entrepreneurs? Or artists? Engineers? Writers? Innovators? Researchers? There’s no time to reflect on the answer, because courses and programmes must be developed quickly in response to the crazy growth in the market for design education.

Design has expanded. In the digital domain we’ve seen the emergence of interaction design, game design and app design. Managerial tools now include design thinking and business model design. In the humanitarian domain we now have service design, human-centred design and social design. None of these new directions bear much relation to the roots of the profession in industrial or product design. Instead, we are increasingly coming to view design more as a mentality than a skill. And while education struggles with this shift, the market for education keeps on growing.

Half a century ago, universities established courses in design largely as offshoots of mechanical engineering. In addition to technology, designers received academic instruction in design methods. Design freedom was therefore limited. Academies of art established courses grounded in ceramic and graphic design, which were both practical and artistic in orientation. For decades just two professional profiles existed alongside each other: a designer was either a creative engineer or a practitioner of an applied art.

The design explosion disrupts education. Teachers and administrators in the field of education disagree about what to teach designers. In Eindhoven the battle even culminated in a personal shootout among the academy’s management. While individual teachers and administrators harbour explicit, personal opinions, there is no shared vision about what to teach designers.

Is collaboration with other disciplines the most important aspect? Or is it still creative ability? Should programming be a compulsory subject? Or understanding of production processes? Is a knowledge of materials still important? Which entrepreneurial, journalistic and research skills should students learn? And should they be instructed in a more didactic setting than has been the case up to now?

While schools are driven to desperation, the market for design education is growing explosively. Århus, Bern and Amsterdam have all seen the emergence of creative business schools boasting names like Kaospilots and Knowmads, with a clear vision of creative and social entrepreneurship. Students are capable of writing business plans, learn about management strategies for online start-ups, and are blessed with a mentality of engagement. Leadership skills are also on the syllabus. Businessweek rates them as “top design schools”.

Start-up schools and bootcamps have come up with new learning formats for prototyping commercial ideas. Courses are internal and last about half a year. Students pay for their tuition with shares in the business they plan to set up. Admission is determined on the basis of ideas proposed by prospective students, and courses focus entirely on the elaboration of one single idea.

Hasso Plattner has initiated schools for design thinking and design innovation known as the Institute of Design and the School of Design Thinking. This is where one of the best-selling apps of 2010 – Pulse Reader – was created. In addition, over 80 courses in interaction design have emerged, usually through the addition of a design component to an existing course in technology.

Even though most designers think that service design “has nothing to do with design”, the Royal College of Art in London recently established a course in this field. Similarly, Domus Academy, the birthplace of Memphis, is doing its bit by offering a course in business design. In New York courses in design criticism were established recently, and a course in curating and writing will launch this year in Eindhoven. Design thinking is offered as a subject at many American universities. So although fundamental questions remain unanswered, new courses are popping up everywhere like mushrooms. It makes you wonder just how good all those courses really are.

Now that the education market is totally globalised, schools are recruiting students all over the world. Everybody who pays is welcome. In Europe, European students bring in less money than real foreigners, so students from further afield are more lucrative. Tuition fees for a masters course at Domus costs €17,000 for students from Europe, but €25,000 for students from everywhere else. That’s cheap compared to design criticism, where you’ll pay $18,000 per semester.

The multicultural make-up of the student population is often seen as a criterion for quality. But is learning in a class with lots of nationalities really better? I don’t think so. Something else is expected of designers in Seoul or Dubai than in Paris. Around the world there are vast differences in levels of professional freedom, in the role of clients, in how critical a design can be.

You don’t go to school in Hong Kong if you want to become a chef in Montpellier. But that’s precisely what’s happening in design. And the upshot is the globalisation of masters courses, which are churning out jetlag designers who lack a cultural framework.

Academies of art educate students to master specific skills such as game design, interaction design, business design, social design or service design. Graduates become practitioners of applied arts in the old sense of the term. Universities turn out managers and engineers, who have never quite been able to master the unpredictability of design and creativity.

It would be better to leave design thinking to schools of management, and leave interaction and game design to schools of computer science.

Design criticism could be instructed at schools of journalism, and social design at teacher-training colleges. A creative and design dimension to these professions can develop or evolve organically in such places. Design has become a mentality that can be applied in courses structured to impart specific skills. That is better than the reverse, which is now the case.

Design no longer belongs to anybody. Design no longer belongs to the people, places of education or lobby groups that have represented and tutored it for decades. Let it go. The time has come to give design away.

Lucas Verweij has been teaching at schools of design and architecture around Europe for over 20 years. He was director of a master’s programme in architecture and initiated a masters course in design. He is currently professor at the Kunsthochschile Weißensee and teaches master’s students at Design Academy Eindhoven. He has initiated and moderated various seminars devoted to designing design education.

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more as a mentality than a skill” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: a Le Corbusier design for a customisable house inspired by the devastation of Flanders during the First World War has haunted architecture ever since, says Justin McGuirk.

Any major anniversary carries with it a baggage of minor ones, and so it is in 2014. When Europe marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War later this year, few people will be thinking about architecture. And yet it was the devastation of Flanders in the autumn of 1914 that inspired Le Corbusier to design the Maison Dom-ino, a standardised construction system for the reconstruction effort that was to come. That simple drawing has haunted architecture for a century. Indeed, it is far more relevant today than it was then.

The Architectural Association in London kicked off the commemorations last week with The Dom-ino Effect, a symposium dedicated to Corb’s idea. Fill a room with Le Corbusier scholars and the proceedings will tend towards the arcane, but I stuck with them, not just because I was presenting at the end of the day but because of what the Dom-ino represents: perhaps the first case in architectural history of a house designed as an open system, a “platform” – to use some Silicon Valley jargon – for residents to complete as they see fit.

Le Corbusier was just 27 when he conceived of the Dom-ino – so called because the houses could be joined end to end like dominos, and hyphenated to combine “domus” and “innovation”.

By November 1914, one fifth of the Belgian population was homeless. Corb’s solution was almost painfully simple: a standardised, two-storey house made up of concrete slabs supported on columns and a staircase. That was it – no walls, no rooms, just a skeleton. He hoped to patent the idea and make his fortune in partnership with his friend Max Du Bois’ concrete firm. This would be a housing assembly line, like the one Henry Ford had invented only the year before. But it wasn’t to be. Failing to find any backers, he was forced to abandon the idea.

More than one speaker last week pointed out that the Dom-ino model doesn’t actually work. First of all, the columns are too slender to support those slabs, and secondly, the placement of the staircase prevents the houses being joined end to end as the name implies. Moreover, Corb’s vision for the resulting houses was far from radical: traditional bourgeois facades concealing conventional bourgeois layouts. And yet, if you take his drawing at face value, as pure structure, it was a phenomenally bold idea. So bold, that no one recognised it, not even, at first, Corb himself.

Today, we are only too aware that most homes on the planet are built without architects. Go to the suburbs of Cairo, and you’ll find they are made up of thousands of medium-rise concrete frames, filled in with terracotta blocks. As Pier Vittorio Aureli, the symposium’s organiser, put it, “the Dom-ino has become an ever-present ghost in the contemporary city – it seems to be everywhere.”

If only his patrons had known that one day millions of houses would be built along similar lines, not just in Europe but in the slums of the developing world.

The London-based architect Platon Issaias argued that most of Athens is made up of Dom-ino houses. After the Second World War, the Greek government stoked the recovery by allowing families to sell plots of land to developers for a share of the resulting buildings. The polykatoikia, a multi-storey apartment block, is effectively a tall Dom-ino, built without an architect, in which every family has configured their own apartments. The model was so successful that it created a vast class of landowners – and, of course, debtors.

What is radical about Dom-ino is that it is merely the beginning of a process, one completed by residents themselves. It is, in other words, the abandonment of total design. The architect is no longer a visionary, just a facilitator.

That very idea was taken up by Stewart Brand in the 1990s in his book and subsequent BBC series How Buildings Learn. Better known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the original Californian techno-utopians, Brand took on architecture and argued that buildings work best when they evolve gradually and incrementally. As a critique of architecture it was not particularly potent, and yet, characteristically, he was ahead of the curve. Today, architects as diverse as Santiago’s Alejandro Aravena and London’s 00, designers of the Wikihouse, argue that what we need are self-empowering systems not finished houses.

“All buildings are predictions,” wrote Brand. “All predictions are wrong.” That is certainly true of Torre David, the 45-storey skyscraper in Caracas that was meant to be a financial headquarters but is now home to 3,000 squatters. The Torre, I have argued, picking up on an idea posited by the architects Urban-Think Tank, is a Dom-ino house extrapolated into a skyscraper – essentially a concrete framework, inhabited and transformed by an unexpected population. It is the Dom-ino on an urban scale, with its own retail and sports facilities, with corridors as streets. Life there is precarious, and yet the residents have something very few of us do: the right to determine the terms of their own existence.

As the Dom-ino was born out of crisis, so it seems to remain associated with it. Thus far, it sounds like the product of scarcity, the solution to a global housing deficit. And yet it has echoes in “high” architecture too. As Maria Giudici pointed out, OMA‘s unbuilt design for the Jussieu Library, with its skeletal, open framework, is reminiscent of it. Even more strikingly, look at SANAA‘s Rolex Learning Centre, a fluid landscape of nothing but floor, ceiling and columns. The rhetoric behind this building was one of chance encounters and the sharing of ideas, it was the language of social media. And this is where Corb’s drawing comes into its own, as a platform, in every sense of the word.

Ironically, Corb had Fordist standardisation in mind and yet produced the perfect architectural symbol for an era obsessed with customisation and participation. Stripped of architecture, the Dom-ino is pure system. It invites us to complete it and inhabit it in any way we desire. More than the specific system itself, it is that idea that is so relevant today. By the same token, the drawing is so open that we can read what we choose into it.

Image of Favela, a crowded Brazilian slum in Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of Shutterstock.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

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obsessed with customisation and participation” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: watching the demolition of her own elementary school, Alexandra Lange reflects on the increasingly generic design of schools, museums and playgrounds that resign children to “places where all they can learn are the tasks we set them.”

They tore down my elementary school last week. The demolition of childhood memories is enough to make anyone nostalgic, but in this case, there was something more. My school, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was designed by Josep Lluís Sert: Modernist master, former Harvard Graduate School of Design dean, and architect of the superb Peabody Terrace apartments just across the street. I didn’t know Sert designed my school until last year, but the building had its effects. When I started kindergarten in 1977, the building was just six years old. I may have lived in a Victorian house, but I learned and played in a thoroughly contemporary environment, with red Tectum walls, folding retractable partitions and clerestory light.

Although I had not been back inside since my family moved in 1982, I could still draw a rough plan from memory. The kindergarten classrooms, each with its own outdoor space, lined up along Putnam Avenue. The light-filled central hall, an indoor thoroughfare entered from the street or from the playground behind, that linked auditorium, gym, cafeteria, classes. The recessed, mouth-like entrance, echoing with noise before the doors opened in the morning. The sense of progression as you aged up, from front to back, downstairs to upstairs. The architectural meaning was clear: protective of the little ones, offering more territory as you grew older. This was a building for children with a cast-in-place pedagogy.

Like the similarly demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, the exterior suggested something of the fortress, but the interior was warm and light, shaped by its program. But a change in technology and teaching methods – the new project brief includes breakout spaces, computer labs and ENO Boards – need not have doomed a building based on a grid of concrete columns and floors. The photographs I took of the King School in its half-demolished state suggested a possible future as well: the rhythmic frame as a set ready to be recycled, a new school on an old base that utilised its embodied energy rather than eliminating it.

Looking at the rendering posted on the construction fence, then back up at the exposed reinforcing bars, I see a loss greater than my experience, or for Modernism. I see another space for children made more generic, our mania for safety and uniformity consigning children to a world of tan boxes tricked out with primary-coloured objects. How can you learn about the world in spaces without character?

Across Boston, a number of other Sert buildings have been (or are in the process of being) renovated, including Peabody Terrace, the Boston University School of Law and an office building at 130 Bishop Allen Drive. Harvard has plans to renovate his Holyoke Center, and has hired Hopkins Architects to do the job: in the future, it will be a central meeting point for the university’s diverse schools, students and programs.

Why was the fate of the King School different? According to advocates, reuse was a hard sell. Like so many of its Brutalist brethren, the school was not popular in its immediate neighbourhood, despite that neighbourhood being a striking collection of postwar low- and high-rise buildings. In focusing on the building’s past and pedigree, preservationists may have neglected to offer a vision of how the building might be born again and added to. Perkins Eastman’s feasibility report gives short shrift to this option, accentuating the negative.

If the new design filled me with interest, joy or curiosity I might be less sad, but as a collection of tan boxes arranged along a circulation spine and presented to the community with an arsenal of contextual photos, it makes me feel nothing. Like so many other spaces for children – schools, museums, playgrounds – it looks like the box that the toys come in. Fine when the creative child can turn that box into a toy. Less interesting when the adults decide which way is up and which colours connote the most fun. In such spaces, the engagement and learning happens at the level of graphics, touchscreens, what the educators like to call “manipulatives.” The buildings themselves don’t speak, don’t teach, they merely house while complying with all requirements. There’s little to be absorbed from experience and I doubt anyone will be drawing the plan, or mentally resting her cheek against the Tectum, 36 years on.

When Rafael Viñoly updated the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, he added curvaceous shapes and primary colours to the outside, the better to signify child-like wonder. But inside the new rooms were boxy and plain, the better to accommodate a rotating series of exhibits and birthday parties. The architectural excitement is all decoration; the inside is a barn. By contrast, Cambridge Seven Associates’s New England Aquarium, an exact contemporary of the King School, turns the reason why you go to an aquarium (to see the fish) into the organising principle for the building’s architecture. It’s also a box, but one textured at key points to indicate the ocean wonders inside; a box that leads you, tank by tank, on a scenographic journey from sea lions to penguins to more fish than you’ve ever seen in one place. All you have to do to experience the aquarium is walk, at your own pace, up the ramp that wraps a multi-story tank. No need for IMAX, no need to read (if you’re under 6) the underwater experience is right there in the dark, intriguing space.

Playgrounds offer another journey from the specific to the generic. Susan G. Solomon’s book American Playgrounds describes the high points of playground experimentation in the postwar period, from Richard Dattner’s Adventure Playgrounds in Central Park (some recently restored and updated) to Isamu Noguchi’s experiments with sculptural dreamscapes. Architects today are interested in making playgrounds again and many interesting experiments can be found in the book Playground Design by Michelle Galindo (2012). But Solomon describes a decade-by-decade constriction of spatial ambition as the result of fears over safety and budget. The model playground became a black, rubberised surface fitted with fixed, mass-produced equipment. You can see the same equipment, often made by Kompan, in Brooklyn and in Copenhagen. Where’s the adventure in that? What’s missing is loose parts, idiosyncratic parts, architecture that has ideas about learning and wants to help kids figure things out. Brooklyn Boulders, a growing chain of indoor climbing spaces for adults and children, seems to have hit on a contemporary formula at their sites in Brooklyn, Somerville and San Francisco.

What is at stake here not a question of Modernity (and indeed, not even all the Modern architecture historians in Cambridge got excited about saving the King School). Rather, it is respect for children as sensitive consumers of space. I read in the built work of Cambridge Seven Associates, Sert and Noguchi that children deserve the best design can give them, even if it might be scary for a moment (that dark aquarium) or strange until you climb it (those artificial mountains). The sanding down, the rounding off, the demolition of the obdurate, makes our children’s worlds more boring places, places where all they can learn are the tasks we set them. Amy F. Ogata’s recent book Designing the Creative Child describes the myriad ways middle-class ambitions are translated into the toys we buy and the spaces we make for kids inside our homes. But such ambitions also need to be translated into the public sphere.

Look again at the King School, structure laid bare. What better exercise than to say, “Here’s a set of concrete floors and concrete columns, kids. What do you want to put in your new school?”

Alexandra Lange is a New York-based architecture and design critic. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014 and is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism.

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in spaces without character?” appeared first on Dezeen.