Description

For many early years communities, one of the most conflicting issues in any new provision is the tension between security (the need to keep children in and unwanted visitors out) and openness (maintaining a welcoming and friendly face to the community). Many new facilities will be surrounded by high metal fences and bristling with the latest CCTV surveillance equipment. Security will be detached from the initial architectural concept, with the result looking more like a prison than a welcoming ‘home away from home’.

Here at Xiayu Kindergarten, the architects have taken these two seemingly contradictory requirements and worked to incorporate them into a convincing architectural narrative. This comprises two wings of accommodation, each of which is surrounded by a high wall. One is a curving glazed wall, which encloses administration offices and community facilities for adults, the other contains the children’s accommodation. This is organised within the wall or compound in the form of two-storey family villas, each containing a living room, a dining room, a bedroom, a children’s toilet area and generous storage. In reality it is all play space, since the entirety of each two-storey family block will be open to children.

Between the villas there are external courtyard areas, each with its own play yard of trees and hard landscaping. By adopting the village compound concept, there is a recognisable form, to which the users can relate immediately. Treating the two enclosing walls differently, one glazed, the other solid, further enhances the legibility of the metaphor. So the wing of administration/offices is transparent and open (as it should be), whilst the wall surrounding the children’s accommodation is playful, yet totally secure; it has coloured doors and vertical mosaic strips, inlaid in seemingly haphazard patterns along its entire length. The wall is 3.5 metres high, yet the two-storey houses within are clearly visible above it; each is brightly coloured in vibrant orange, green and yellow hues, communicating an instant sense of recognition for children and parents approaching from the surrounding area. The children can recognise that they now belong to two families, that of the kindergarten and their own family group. Undoubtedly what initiated the random layout was a concern by the designers, that making all the accommodation too linear and ordered would be de-humanising in such a large-scale facility. As a result, the two wings of accommodation have been twisted and skewed to react against the site-related curved walls of each compound.

At ground floor each of the 15 homebase or family areas is paired with another and divided with full panel opening doors to provide flexibility for group interaction. At first floor level what the designers call living rooms and bedrooms are articulated as slightly detached floating boxes, a suitable emphasis on the quiet restful activities which are intended to take place there. Each bedroom is interconnected by way of lightweight timber walkways. The whole composition gives an anti-institutional sense of warmth and slightly quirky informality. A fitting ‘city of childhood’ on the banks of the river, where future generations will grow and prosper.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.