☉ Amsterdam children's playschool is an honour mention proposal by Caraíba for Archmedium designed in 2016. It is located in Amsterdam Netherlands in a seaside setting. Its scale is medium. Concepts such as floating and infrastructure are explored. Review the 19 proposals for the same competition.
It is now widely accepted that children construct their own understanding of the world in an active way through conversational processes. They are not empty receptacles that can be filled with knowledge, but learn through a dialogical dance with their social and environmental context. In this sense, outdoor experiences and the engagement in creative and open-ended activities are essential for the construction of knowledge in a constructivist understanding of learning. We believe that the architectural space can be in itself a pedagogical tool that can be enhanced by the dynamic engagement for its transformation. The proposed space behaves like a pluripotent plaza on two levels: the continuation of the street sets the most public level, preserving much of the existing space for activities that already happens and an excavated semipublic level, where the playschool´s main practices take place.
Between these levels, an axis of resilient infrastructure system consisting of shafts and robots shifts all kinds of infrastructural equipment – from furniture to bathrooms and reconfigurable rooms – both horizontally, enabling the playschool to spatially adapt itself as pedagogically needed, or vertically, providing a reprogrammable infrastructure and opportunities for expanding the socially embedded networks. This reprogrammable infrastructure is enabled by a robot ecosystem that dialogues with people of all ages, making obsolete the need for a fixed program while raising a question: how designers can go further and think about others dialogical systems that engage the user in reprogramming of spaces?