Places as Playmates: Alternative educational architecture

Over on Bobulate, Liz Danzico asks what places we consider playmates:

“The simple form of a tree provides inspiration for a kindergarten space and movement as a tool for learning:

‘In “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that what children and foreigners have in common is the absence of knowledge of language and a set of codified rules. This leads them — in the first instance — to learn through the senses and the body. To give the children more freedom to move around the school, the directors of the Fuji Kindergarten requested Tezuka to design spaces without furniture: no chairs, desks or lecterns. As a result, “Ring Around a Tree” offers an architecture where there are no measures taken to constrain space, in order to liberate the body.’

And that includes the floors of the structure itself:

‘The space created by Tezuka seems to have just two floors, but for the children the building has six floors with volumes that are one meter high. The compressed spaces, which can only be reached by crawling, further the freedom of movement and ability to use the body as a means of learning.’

The tree was a “place-playmate” for several generations — a treehouse, a waiting shelter, a climbing space — before recently transformed. What places do we consider playmates, and how might they be, should they be, transformed?”

‘Trichopterae’ by Hubert Duprat (plus some caddis flies): A TBE SHORT

Trichopterae is “an unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae,” write the people at Cabinet magazine.

“The larvae are remarkably adaptable: if other suitable materials are introduced into their environment, they will often incorporate those as well. … After collecting the larvae from their normal environments, [Duprat] relocates them to his studio where he gently removes their own natural cases and then places them in aquaria that he fills with alternative materials from which they can begin to recreate their protective sheaths. He began with only gold spangles but has since also added…precious stones.”

COLLECTED: Two Guns, Ice Wall, Grand Large District, Peter Bynum

1. OPERATION NEPTUNE

DUNKIRK, FRANCE — “The Grand Large district lies in a special urban context: between the city and the sea, between seaside resort aesthetic and port aesthetic, and between residential and communal. It prolongs the overall strategy of the Neptune project, launched in 1991, which aims to orient the city back towards the docks. This transformation of the urban centre has already been broadly achieved. The Grand Large district marks the start of the second phase of Operation Neptune.” —Arch Daily, Photos: Stephane Chalmeau

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2. HUMANIZED HABITAT

TWO GUNS, AZ — “Two Guns is an abandoned town off old Route 66 in Arizona. It died in the 1960s when I-40 passed it by. I’m thinking about living there someday.” —James Reeves

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3. LIGHT TRAPS

HUDSON RIVER VALLEY, NY — “[Peter] Bynum uses glass as his canvas, following stints with Mylar and Plexiglass, often in multiples where more light can be trapped between layers. The viewer can even use a remote control dimmer to change the level of lighting in some of these illuminated paintings. Everything is Illuminated runs through April 30, 2011 at Bridge Gallery in New York.” —Moco Loco

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4. SPRING PLANTING

CAMBRIDGE, MA — “As part of the Festival of Arts, Science and Technology earlier this spring at MIT, third-year architecture student Yushiro Okamoto designed and built IceWall, a temporary installation facing the Charles River. IceWall is a series of frozen blocks embedded with seeds and stacked on top of each other in a curving spine. As winter turned to spring, the wall would melt into the grass leaving seeds behind to germinate and bloom.” —Bridgette Meinhold

Rate of dissolution

Mike Chino, from Inhabitat, on the end of The World:

[Given] Dubai’s stratospheric rise over the past few years, it may come as no surprise that several of its projects have flown too close to the sun. The World was envisioned as the ultimate luxury retreat: for an exorbitant price you could lay claim to your own private island—a corner of the globe to call your own. … [But] a property tribunal recently cited evidence that the islands have begun to erode and the waterways that separate them are dissolving due to the influx of sand.

The irony is palpable. The Telegraph has more.