LVL 4 F

LVL 3

E

LVL 2 D C B

ENTRANCE

+ SCHOOL + CITY

PROGRAM A LVL 1 TRANSPORTATION B LVL 2 DINING AREA C LVL 2 AUDITORIUM D LVL 2 ADMIN OFFICES E LVL 3 CLASSROOMS F LVL 4 LIBRARY G LVL 1 CAMPING A h LVL 1 ANIMAL CENTER

STOP MAKING SENSE: Named after the 1984 Talking Heads concert performance film by Jonathan Demme, this proposal intends to provoke just such a response. Sense, the faculty by which one perceives the external stimuli of sound, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, is not something to be architecturally and spatially intended but is instead offered as an open question. Sense becomes the summary of each child’s individual choices in navigating the interior/exterior world of the kids factory.

The factory has been re-organized into a campus with four principal regions. On axis with the main entrance and occupying the original administrative offices is the Research Center. Also sharing this main axial entryway is the central feature, the Playground, occupying the entirety of the factory ground floor. To the right, occupying the factory upper floors, and entered beneath the clock tower is the School/Library. To the left of the main building, + CAMP following alongside the factory’s exterior wall, leads one to the Kids Camp which has replaced and reordered the former loading areas. G The importance of learning through inventive play developed by such educational pioneers as Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori is now recognized as well as time-tested worldwide. Reconsidering their ideas between operative scales- from the hand to the room to the campus to the encompassing city and larger natural environment- is the challenge of this project.