In Forest kindergarten, situated in a densely forested area in the countryside of Shandong, China, Junya Ishigami aims to connect children with their surrounding natural environment and reflect perspectives from their world.
The spatial composition of the building is kept as simple as possible in order to allow for freedom in the children’s playing and activities. He took into account the different scales to think about different spaces: classrooms include the scale of an adult, other spaces can only be used by children, whereas other spaces are not within reach for children either, thus inspiring a multitude of activities. Emerging from figurative imagery, the architecture takes form to allow children to perceive and imagine a multitude of worlds and possibilities. For instance, where the roof dips downward, children feel as if they are falling on top of a flower or sliding down an elephant’s nose. Abstract and concrete, giant and minuscule, interior and exterior are mixed so that every space in every way opens every child up to infinite imagination, creating architecture made entirely of non architectural elements, thus “freeing architecture”.
Kids park, a project conceived for a private commission in 2013 in Japan, further elaborates on the idea of freedom. For this interior playground for children Junya Ishigami thought about how architecture would change if considered from a child’s view of the world. At the scale of a child, a tabletop supported by table legs makes a space similar to that of a roof supported by pillars. Yet for an adult, the architectural quality of a table is inhabitable, even incomprehensible. To expand this notion, the architect imagined a potential for architecture for a miniature world, through the space made by an animal. He viewed the project for an interior children’s park as an opportunity akin to planning a city populated by animals as buildings. When small children play around in this new town, a dog becomes a large roof, a bear becomes a dome, the open mouth of a hippopotamus becomes a cave. In the space created by these animals each child expands his or her imagination in a unique, unexpected way to find a new world.
