Anna Martovitskaya, editor-in-chief
speech: / provided speech:
The fourteenth issue of speech: is devoted to one of the brightest and most cheerful themes in contemporary architecture - objects for children. The younger generation today is more than ever in the spotlight of architects and urban planners, which, in general, is not surprising for an era when investments in human potential are recognized as the most promising. The typology of architecture for children has reached its maximum diversity today - not only the usual kindergartens and schools, but also all kinds of educational and leisure centers, museums, libraries are now responsible for the development of such invaluable skills as curiosity, creativity and the ability to communicate., specially organized public spaces and, of course, playgrounds. And when choosing objects for this issue, we first of all tried to reflect precisely the variety of buildings created today for children - under our bright cover you can find both schools (for example, the Atelier Phileas multifunctional school complex in Paris, which appeared on the cover of this issue), and playgrounds. playgrounds (Willem Augustin Park bureau Carve in Amsterdam), and the children's library (the library Ninos Conarte in Monterrey by the architectural bureau Anagrama), and the vaccination center for children in Kenya (architect SelgasCano), where the issue of the health of young citizens, alas, still remains much more priority and acute than the issue of education.
Geographical has become an equally important principle for the selection of projects and topics for publication in the "children's" issue - we tried to cover a lot of countries in order to show a wide palette of approaches to solving the children's issue. There is also the United States, Mexico, the already mentioned Africa, and various European countries. At the same time, a very representative Scandinavian bloc has taken shape by itself. Several Danish buildings for children are also mentioned in the "Theme of the issue" (for example, the wonderful Forfatterhuset kindergarten in Copenhagen by the COBE bureau, whose facades seem to be assembled from elegant wooden slats, although in fact they are brick), and in the "Wednesday" section, individual texts are devoted to Finnish and Norwegian facilities for the little ones. For the preparation of the last material, I would like to especially thank the Culture Department of the Norwegian Embassy in Russia and the Norwegian Center for Design and Architecture, which very lively and informally responded to the theme of our fourteenth issue. The main character of the issue and its presentation, which took place on May 22 at the ZIL Cultural Center, was the architect
Dorte Mandrup, recipient of the S. F. Hansen Medal, Denmark's highest architectural award. Projects in the field of education occupy a special place in her portfolio: in addition to traditional kindergartens and schools, the architect successfully works at the intersection of typologies, creating multidisciplinary cultural and educational centers. It was about them that Dorte Mandrup talked about at a lecture called Move / Play / Learn, which she read at the presentation of the issue speech: for children.
Traditionally, Moscow occupies a special place in speech: magazine. On the one hand, we, in principle, always choose topics that are relevant specifically for Russian architecture, and it is difficult to argue with the fact that in our country children's buildings for many years were perceived solely as synonyms for something monotonous and dull. On the other hand, it was Moscow that first undertook to change this situation, making the quality of architecture of objects for children one of the main priorities of its urban planning policy. Today, the capital is experiencing a real boom in the construction of schools and kindergartens of a new generation and, perhaps, sometimes does it even too loudly and brightly, naturally reacting to the recent widespread dominance of grayness and large reinforced concrete panels. I am sure that over time, the palette of buildings will become more restrained and subdued - after all, this is only the first step towards an innovative educational environment, and we hope that our new issue will become a good help for Moscow and Russian architects along the way, a useful guide to interesting solutions in this area. With special pride I want to note that one of the schools built in Russia - School No. 14 in Pushkino, designed by the ADM bureau - has entered our main heading "Object", where works by foreign architects are most often published. And one more famous Moscow object became the hero of our retrospective section "Gallery" - the Palace of Pioneers on Sparrow Hills, about which art critic Anna Bronovitskaya wrote.
