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.