Connect

Connect, nursery school extension (Eng) This nursery school project is extension to the main existing building. The old existing building is typical facilities of closed boxes. It is difficult to encourage children to behave freely in the existing building. Although, architecture is physically unmovable but children move as they like. We realize that children's movement is most important consideration for design. It doesn't mean to design only the behavior of children but also to know the reason why they behave freely as their pleases. [Design Process] The client brought up the problem about a trend towards having fewer children. According to her, children today are generally bad at group action and tend to shut themselves in comparing with the period of increasing birthrate. For the purpose of encouraging children to act harmoniously in a group, we kept on expanding or cutting down the space vertically and horizontally. In that process we found out a three-dimensional loop as one. There is no partition wall inside. We think this “united loop” makes it possible to have various kind of group depending on their needs with movable furniture which we designed using wheels. Furthermore, we turned our attention to the border between inside and outside where a lot of elements like light, air, noise, view, smell etc, come up time after time. We tried these elements to exist anywhere in the “united loop” as equal quality. Actually, it was long way to decide the form of this loop.