DETAIL 9.2025 Concept: Building for Children

Freedom and Structure

No phase of life is more formative than childhood, and the buildings children experience leave lasting impressions. How do architecture, design, and spatial layout shape those impressions? Do young users benefit more from clearly ordered structures or from open space – ergonomics or imaginative challenges?

As the first independent environments children encounter beyond the home, nurseries, daycare centres, and kindergartens should not appear merely as colourful fantasy worlds. Well-conceived early-learning centres and schools create a microcosm modelled on everyday life – child-friendly yes, but by no means childish. Such places offer security while inviting discovery, appropriation, and adaptation.

In this issue we profile child-focused environments realised both as new builds and through adaptive reuse. A kindergarten on a disused industrial site near Copenhagen follows circular construction principles, using mostly materials salvaged from the dilapidated primary school that once stood there. Newly built daycare centres in the German state of Hessen and in Slovenia draw on local building traditions and the surrounding natural landscape. Meanwhile, a former East German telephone exchange was transformed into a playscape that anchors a childcare facility on a university campus in Merseburg.