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Children: The Latest Architecture and News

“Children’s Forest:” The Lithuanian Pavilion Acts as an Educational Tool at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

For the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Lithuanian Pavilion will present an exhibition titled “Children’s Forest Pavilion”, curated by Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule, and Jonas Žukauskas. The intervention aims to become a playscape, acknowledging the unique perspectives through which children observe and interact with their environment. The project strives to explain the ecosystem of the forest, bringing together works and findings developed in parallel to outdoor activities held with children in the woodlands of Lithuania and Finland. Environmental educators, activists, architects and foresters will discuss the idea of forests as negotiated spaces where all actors play an important role. The Pavilion will be open from May 20th until November 26th, 2023.

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How to Choose Children’s Bedroom Furniture

In the majority of family homes, it’s common for children to be given the smallest rooms. They are, after all, the smallest people. But where grown-ups have the rest of the house to fill with their accrued material wealth, children’s only freedom to decide what they do and where things go, is in that one small room.

Learning about the world can be frustrating, and quickly lead to misdiagnosed ‘bad’ behavior. So creating a safe, welcoming, comfortable space where children can feel calm, loved, and protected while enjoying their independence and individuality, is essential for a happy, healthy childhood. Children’s bedroom design, therefore, has more in common with open-plan living than simple sleeping quarters.

Why We Should Create Cities for Children

Why We Should Create Cities for Children - Featured Image
Image © Hiroyuki Oki

In the book Design of Childhood, architect and researcher Alexandra Lange states that children were considered nonpersons throughout almost the entire history of ancient and modern architecture, being excluded from the process of creating urban and interior spaces. This process has caused and is still causing several problems when children reach adulthood, since these children grew up being constantly watched by fear of movement and the eyes of adults.

10 Actions to Improve Streets for Children

Last week, the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) released Designing Streets for Kids to set a new global baseline for designing urban streets. Designing Streets for Kids builds upon the approach of putting people first, with a focus on the specific needs of babies, children, and their caregivers as pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users in urban streets around the world.

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Placemaking through Play: Designing for Urban Enjoyment

Humane cities center around the relationships between people and places. Communities thrive on shared resources, public spaces, and a collective vision for their locality. To nurture happy and healthy cities, designers and the public apply methods of placemaking to the urban setting. Placemaking—the creation of meaningful places—strongly relies on community-based participation to effectively produce magnetic public spaces.

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Nurseries and Children’s Rooms: 20 Examples to Inspire the Imagination

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Casa Jardim / asdesign. Foto: © Rafael Renzo

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The room for babies or children is a space designed not only for rest and sleep time, but also to encourage imagination, bring symbols that help build perception of the world and, without forgetting, provide fun to the little ones. In addition to sheltering childhood, bringing functionality to this environment and adapting so many functions in the same area often require huge creativity by mothers and fathers, so the search for an architecture professional can be more than welcome.

Author Tim Gill on Building Child-Friendly Cities in Design and the City Podcast

In this episode of Design and the City - a podcast by reSITE on how to make cities more liveable – scholar, writer and consultant Tim Gill, author of Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities, talks about the importance of designing cities that can foster play and empower children autonomy, as a way of creating inclusive urban environments fit for all ages and abilities. Gill argues for enhancing children's everyday freedom and discusses his research into ideas and principles that would make neighbourhoods rich in experiences in possibilities, which he defines as child-friendly urban planning.

Miniature Architecture: 17 Projects that Explore Interior Design for Children

The world certainly looks different through the eyes of a young child; enormous, intriguing, and somewhat overwhelming, and it has long been believed that what we encounter as children shapes up our perspective of the world. When asked about his childhood memories in Switzerland, Peter Zumthor shared that the memories of his youth contain the deepest architectural experience, which have become reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that he explores in his work as an architect today. 

Having a complete understanding of how children change and grow physically and psychologically throughout their childhood requires an in depth observation of different factors, such as their hereditary traits and genetics, the interactions they have with other children and adults, as well as the environment they are living, playing, and learning in. In celebration of World Children’s Day on November 20th, we look at how architects and designers stimulated children's autonomy and promoted their mental and physical wellbeing through architecture and interior design.

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Olson Kundig Reinterprets Noah's Ark for Children's Experience at the Jewish Museum in Berlin

Completed in 2020, amidst the pandemic, ANOHA- The Children’s World designed by Olson Kundig for the Jewish Museum in Berlin is finally opening its doors to the young public. The design reinterprets the myth of Noah’s Ark and furthers the concept and ideas of a similar installation at Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, created by the firm then named Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen. More than a museum experience, the project is a space for community building, a place for imagination and play that enacts a universal story, creating an inclusive environment for children and families of all cultures and backgrounds.

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Children's Scale: A Brief History of Kid's Furniture

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Children's furniture is all furniture –fixed or mobile– that is designed according to the ergonomic guidelines and anatomical dimensions of children specifically. Following this definition, we can identify two types of furniture: (1) those that facilitate a relationship between the caregiver and the child, and (2) those that allow the child to use them independently.

The big difference between these two types is that the first has dimensions that mainly adapt to the ergonomics of the adult, while the second is designed to meet the ergonomic needs of the child at each stage of their development. Since the growth of children occurs relatively quickly, it is common for the furniture of this second group to be multifunctional or even extendable.