Furniture Design Ideas

Is the world a more dangerous place for children, or is it increasingly the convention to represent it that way? It always was dangerous – a century ago accidents with horses, spillages of noxious fluids, the intermingling of workplaces with living spaces, open fires and gas lighting meant that child deaths through accidents in the […]

packs of feral children roaming our streets… this terrifying generation of murderous, morally blank wolf-children, fatherless, undisciplined, indulged one minute then brutalized the next…we need to lock up more of these thugs and punish them.2 This quotation is one of many lamenting the breakdown of law and order, for which children are being held partly […]

Helen Penn Editor’s introduction In this chapter Professor Helen Penn discusses the issue of children and their presence within the public domain. What is the public domain? In this context it can be defined as the shops, restaurants, airports, railway stations and other public areas which are distinct from the private territory of the family, […]

There is little doubt that ICT is changing pedagogy radically and that existing schools will invest as and when technology advances. This goes hand in hand with the need for more flexible learning spaces, and a new approach to school design. The novelty and control this technology allows makes it particularly attractive to boys, who […]

Our escape (as children) from the ugliness of human relations as exemplified by the old city environments to the elegiac beauty of nature, was purely and simply escapism. Even today, most American city centres are largely ugly, anti-urban places, where the only safe way to negotiate the downtown areas is from the safety of a […]

Eisenman compares the fax machine (electronic) and the camera (mechanical) as examples of new and old paradigms stating that: ‘with the fax, the subject [or the user] is no longer called upon to interpret, for reproduction takes place without control or adjustment… The fax also challenges the concept of originality. While in a photograph the […]

Mark Dudek Editor’s introduction Writing in 1992, architect Peter Eisenman states that since the Second World War, a profound change has taken place in the ways in which we interact with the world. He describes this process in somewhat jargonistic terminology as ‘the electronic pradigm’.1 This alludes to the shift from mechanical to electronic devices […]

Set against the backdrop of the secondary citizenship curriculum, increased children’s participation in decision making, and more opportunity for contact between young people and architects, the stage is now set for new ways of working between school teachers, architects and young people. As we have shown, a younger generation of architects like van der Heijden […]

Established between 1999-2000, and originally an Architecture Foundation project, School Works was devised as a way of bringing a new awareness to the relationship between the architecture of secondary school buildings and effective learning. On the one hand, the project seeks to address the gulf between education professionals who don’t appreciate design concepts and find […]

Pupils saw their tall brick board schools as ponderous monolithic structures; as out of date as their designers had perceived their Gothic predecessors. Nevertheless, through the D4R exercises, the pupils managed to overlay upon this perception, snapshots of their dreams, aspirations and obsessions. These took the form of colourful interventions providing for relaxation and fun […]