What Kids Know About Architecture That Architects Have Forgotten
Ninety children in Cambodia were given a design brief. No constraints. No prior knowledge required. Just: draw a house for a bird.
The results are predictably strange. Wonderfully so.
Designer Taekhan Yun ran the workshop in Siem Reap as part of an ongoing series exploring what happens when you hand design problems to people who haven’t yet learned the rules.
The birdhouses that emerged from those drawings are sculptural, idiosyncratic, and somehow more alive than most things built by professionals. Each one started as a crayon sketch.
Children identified local bird species, learned the basics of birdhouse geometry, then ignored most of it and drew whatever they imagined.
Those drawings became clay models. The clay models became physical constructions in wood, cardboard, and paper.
The crayon coloring carried all the way through to the final objects, then sealed with acrylic lacquer. You can see the kid in every one of them.
That’s the point.
Yun’s project sits in an interesting space between design education, participatory art, and something harder to name. The birdhouses are functional. They’re also sculptures. They’re also records of imagination before it learned to doubt itself.
They’re now installed in the trees at the children’s school.
All images by Taekhan Yun.
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3 Comments
Yes indeed! We will reach out to the project creator for an update!
It would be incredibly interesting to see which style attracts the most birds to take up home in.
Unfortunately many birds do not like unusual birdhouses. They may not recognize them as birdhouses. The holes need to be a certain size so large predators or birds will not move in or eat the nestlings. If the birdhouses are too close together the first bird couple will fill one of the houses with sticks and grass to discourage neighbors from moving in. Have the birdhouses hung up to see how many are occupied. This project is a good idea but the students need to do research to discover the right size opening and cavity size for the species that they want to attract.