Aka | Architecture Kids Athens helps kids to become active architectural agents
Local
Greece
{Empty}
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Aka | Architecture Kids Athens Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Christina Last name of representative: Papadimitriou Gender: Female Nationality: Greece Function: Co-Founder & Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 49 Faneromenis Str. Town: Cholargos, Athens Postal code: 15562 Country: Greece Direct Tel:+30 21 0654 4724 E-mail:info@architecturekidsathens.com Website:https://www.architecturekidsathens.com/
Aka | Architecture Kids Athens is an architectural centre for children and young people. It was founded as a non-profit organisation with the purpose of raising the awareness of children and young people for architectural culture as well as the urban and natural environment in which they live. For this purpose, we curate seminars, lectures, exhibitions and other events devoted to architectural and urban culture. Through workshops and other activities, we help children and young people to better understand the environment in which they live and to realize that they are not passive recipients but active participants in its formation, thus contributing to the education of responsible and informed future citizens. Through the active agency of children and young people, we aim to bring the general public in contact with architectural design and to underline its importance for our daily lives with the ultimate goal of creating beautiful, inclusive and sustainable spaces that better serve our common needs.
Our studio is located in a repurposed corner-shop open to everyone in the neighborhood and beyond. In our studio we offer long-term courses and individual workshops that generally revolve around architectural history, theory and design as well as other topics more specifically related to the built environment of Athens. The various courses and workshops are designed for children and teenagers, educators at all levels of expertise as well as the general public. In addition to the work in our own studio space, we offer these courses and workshops to other institutions such as public and private schools, museums and galleries or cultural foundations.
Architecture for Kids
Urban Design for Kids
Education in and through Architecture
Children and Architectural Space
Kids Becoming Architectural Agents
Architecture has a significant impact on the environment. Buildings consume tremendous amounts of resources in order to be planned, built, used and demolished. Increased urbanisation in tandem with shorter life-spans of the buildings erected have led to shortages of essential resources such as sand and water while the landfill produced by demolition has reached hitherto unknown levels of contamination. Aka | Architecture Kids Athens raises awareness for this problematic among children and young people with the aim to foster a more sustainable architectural future. How we do this is best illustrated by an example: Together with the Goethe-Institut in Athens, we have organized an interactive installation with the title “Beginning with Basics. What is Architecture?” The installation is designed for children 9-14 years old and took place free of charge for school classes and the general public both at the Goethe-Institut and the Romantso Cultural Centre in Athens in 2022.
The installation is themed with the concept of the Primitive Hut. The notion of the Primitive Hut runs as a concept through the history of modern architectural theory. It was used in order to refocus the architectural discipline in moments of crisis and to remind architects of their humble beginnings. The aesthetic and technological immediacy of the Primitive Hut, real or imagined, served for example as a means to criticize architectural practices from ecological, social, and economical perspectives. Both powerful and simple in its imagery, this concept is very well understood and received by children. It takes kids back to the imaginary beginnings of architecture and helps them to re-envision its sustainable future. By experiencing the construction of simple spaces with different techniques, children are equipped with first-hand knowledge of practical and theoretical basics of architecture. Simultaneously, the work on the Hut promotes collaboration, critical testing, and environmental awareness.
Architectural and urban design most often neglects the perspective of children and young people. Their needs of physical well-being, social interaction and their own unique ways of aesthetic expression are of little concern to professionals mostly moving in a grown-up world. Aka | Architecture Kids Athens works against this trend because we are convinced that spaces designed for kids and young people ultimately contribute to more beneficial spaces for all. To name a few examples: A sidewalk suitable for prams is also more pleasant to use for the elderly, a safe bike line keeps motorized traffic at bay for all pedestrians, a brighter and more spacious school for kids pleases teachers, too. For these reasons Aka | Architecture Kids Athens researches the relationship between children, young people and their architectural and urban environment from as many perspectives as possible.
One particularly successful example of the research our initiative does is a project we could realize with the financial support of the Hellenic Ministry of Sports and Education. We invited a number of experts, among them architects, architectural historians, sociologists, psychologists, educators as well as curators, to reflect on the notions of childhood and space from their professional perspective in the form of short and informative video-interviews. These videos were then published on our own YouTube channel where they form a small, publically accessible archive of knowledge on topics such as the history of the Greek classroom, the history of open-air schools, the history of school-design, participatory school-design in Greece, child mobility in the city, playgrounds in Athens, autism and spatial inclusion, migration and spatial loss, childhood and digital space as well as children documenting their own space. We see this part of our initiative as a beginning and plan to expand the archive successively with new topics and further interviews.
Architectural education for adults is a very exclusive domain to this day. It is telling that the rise of female or non-Western protagonists in the discipline is still a rather current phenomenon. Additionally, the architectural world is still hard to enter for the poor while successful independent career-starts remain depending on affluence otherwise acquired. Aka | Architecture Kids Athens strives to offer kids a head-start in the world of architectural and urban design regardless of cultural heritage, sex or economic background. Our initiative is expressively founded on the conviction that children and young people of all backgrounds ought to be empowered to realize as early as possible their common potential for becoming active and informed agents in changing their own architectural and urban environment for the better.
While it is already difficult for children to have an architectural education in urban or metropolitan centres, it is almost impossible to acquire in rural areas or more remote and smaller urban agglomerations. Aka | Architecture Kids Athens is therefore trying to also include children and young people from rural areas and remote cities in our initiative. Exemplary of these efforts is a project we undertook in the summer of 2022 with the support of the Hellenic Ministry of Sports and Education in several Cities of Epirus, a region in northern Greece. There, we were able to teach workshops on the common Greek multi-story housing-type also known as “Polykatoikia.” The aim of the workshop was to acquaint children with the cultural, architectural and material history of the building typology that mostly forms the backdrop of their own lives. The kids were encouraged to explore the typology from various perspectives such as literature, theatre and art to then engage in design workshops where they could put their newly acquired knowledge to critical and creative testing. Schools and the general public could attend free of charge.
The participatory impact on our initiative by those affected by it is at this point, unfortunately, not yet a given. We see this as a deficiency to be remedied in the future. On the level of our educational program, however, participatory principles play a key role. Participation, that is the democratic shaping of a course of action within a given initiative or environment by all those directly concerned by it, is an important aspect for the successful implementation of an urban or architectural project. At Aka | Architecture Kids Athens, we help children and young people to appreciate and value participatory processes. In one of our most successful workshops with the title “…a City like a Pizza” (the title is based on a contemporary Greek children’s song) we ask teams of children to design a city with its primary layers (geomorphology, plant life, animal life, infrastructure and buildings) in order to then place their own plots and houses within it. Since the kids start in a tabula-rasa situation, every step needs to be negotiated. Where will mountains and rivers go, where will crops be harvested, where the animals kept, where will be the commercial and cultural centre, and, most importantly, where will all the houses go, who will be whose neighbour and under what conditions? The kids become quickly aware that designing a city is a truly collaborative political act, concerning not just human relations alone, but also our relations to plants, animals, landscapes and technologies. Kids becoming aware of their own agency within the cultural setting of the city, while at the same time becoming aware of the needs of others, and to understand that those are just as valid as one’s own, with the subsequent need to agree on a satisfactory solution for a given situation, is one of the key goals of our initiative.
At this point, Aka | Architecture Kids Athens is mainly carried by its two founders, Christina Papadimitriou and Marc Britz. Co-founder and director Christina Papadimitriou is an architect, archaeologist and architectural historian. She has received her degrees from Princeton University, the Architectural Association, London, the University of Athens and Patras University. Christina has worked as an archaeologist and as an architect at the Greek Ministry of Culture, participating in excavations and conservation projects. From 2018 to 2021 she was the director of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture. Christina has taught architecture and art history at the School of Architecture and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and is a certified architectural educator. Co-founder and creative director Marc Britz is an architect, architectural theorist and historian. He has taught architectural design, urban design and architectural theory at the Architectural Association, London, and the School of Architecture at Princeton University and is a certified architectural educator. He is specialized and certified in Urban Design and Modern Media in Architectural Culture. Marc received his degrees from Princeton University, the Architectural Association, London, Karlsruhe University and has practiced architecture in various offices in Germany and Greece.
Financially speaking Aka | Architecture Kids Athens is so far entirely self-sufficient. Our studio space was financed by a local micro-credit from People's Trust and the support of Action Finance Initiative. Individual projects have until now been financed by the Hellenic Ministry of Sports and Education, the Goethe Institut Athens and the Stavros Niarchos foundation in Greece. A number of private and public kindergartens and schools have supported our initiative with their collaboration.
Our core team at Aka | Architecture Kids Athens already brings a wide set of disciplines together. We are trained architects with years of experience in the field of architectural design and implementation. We have backgrounds in archaeology, urban design as well as in media studies, art- and architectural history. We are certified architectural educators with expertise in teaching both practical and theoretical seminars on an academic level, and, because we are also parents, we know how to respond to the toughest questions asked. At the same time, we love to constantly question ourselves and to broaden our horizon and that of the kids we work for. For this reason we collaborate with protagonists in other fields of knowledge. We work together with theatrical educators in order to explore and better understand the performative nature of our bodies within a given space. We collaborate with English language teachers in order to experiment with the analogies of language and literature with architectural design and spatial perception. And we work with artists in order to bring plastic and pictorial dimensions as well as unfamiliar ways of representation within our focus. Work with film-makers and graphic designers helps us to sharpen our perception for animated and still representations of architecture in two-dimensional space. We believe in multi-perspectival thinking and in collaborative, interdisciplinary processes. It is imperative for our initiative to pass this ethos on to the kids engaging in our workshops and seminars.
With the emphasis on urban and architectural education of children and teenagers, Aka | Architecture Kids Athens partakes in new international developments in pedagogy. Internationally, architecture as a taught subject is gaining prominence on the curricula of primary and secondary school education. This is not surprising because the complexity of its object, the meander of its process, as well as the many media it employs make proficiency in architectural design the ideal set of skills for children to successfully encounter an ever more complex world. The process of architectural design entails a kind of creativity that differs from both, the methods of the natural sciences and the fine arts: With every project being uniquely situated on its plot, there is never one correct solution while the constraints of the brief never allow for total freedom in the execution of the design. Hardly any project evolves without debate, exchange of ideas and negotiation of procedure. Thus, the encountering of one’s own agency and the responsibility for its consequences become immediately palpable. The multidimensional nature of the architectural object as well as of the design process in turn require the use of multiple means of communication in addition to spoken and written word. Architectural design always needs to be mediated in more than one way because any solution to a given task proves to be more substantial if it can be validated also in other forms of expression. Drawings, models, animations and other forms of representation thus enter the educational scene very easily and children’s expressive horizons expand accordingly. Practicing architectural design enables children to exercise multi-perspectival thinking, to grow their sense of agency and responsibility, and to become proficient in communicating their ideas in more than one way. In other words, children proficient in architectural design know how to handle complexity.
Architectural Design is always both universal and particular. It is universally practiced all over the planet but in a particular and unique fashion in different geographical and historical situations. Teaching and learning architectural design depends on the awareness of the context in which it takes place. What we do at Aka | Architecture Kids Athens can easily be transferred and adapted to any given context, if local experts can be won for collaboration. For this reason we are constantly searching for new partners like cultural institutions, other initiatives, schools, interested private enterprises, or individual sponsors who support with the expertise of their respective context the implementation of new common projects. Aka | Architecture Kids Athens participates in the New European Bauhaus initiative with the expressed intent to find new sites of intervention, new collaborations, and perhaps eventually a network of likeminded projects all over the European Union.
At Aka | Architecture Kids Athens, we believe that successful architectural practice is always aimed at engaging with a specific context in order to alter its conditions positively. With its rich architectural heritage, Athens is one of the birthplaces of the European Architectural tradition. It is a city with a diverse and interesting set of museums, architectural and archaeological schools and other long-standing institutions in the form of private foundations, all dedicated to the representation of that heritage. While many visitors come in order to see the outstanding antiquities from diverse historical periods, it is only since recently that they come with the express intend to experience the life of contemporary Athens. More and more foreigners with diverse national backgrounds come to live and work for short and long term periods of time in Athens and are keen to familiarize themselves with the new environment. At the same time, Athenians themselves begin to value and to celebrate the contemporary city and its more modern heritage. Many individual initiatives were founded in recent years with the aim to communicate and promote the knowledge and experience of individual buildings or specific quarters of the city. Bringing together this renewed interest in the city with the new educational approach of using architectural design as pedagogical device, we address kids and their parents, educators and cultural institutions of the city with our specific set of seminars and workshops on architecture. Knowing their city, knowing how to design, the kids become informed agents of positive change.
Our world is challenged on many interrelated levels. Economic crises, military conflicts, forced migration, previously unknown pandemics, man-made climate change, the destruction of globally vital ecosystems and cultural heritages interrelate with vast and often invasive technological changes, urbanisation and corporate internationalisation. Instead of liberty, justice and solidarity, large parts of this planet’s population suffer from political coercion, social and economic injustice and ecological disasters. We at Aka | Architecture Kids Athens believe that a united Europe needs to play a leading role in averting the negative effects of these challenges. Our initiative is convinced that implementing the core values of the New European Bauhaus “Beautiful. Together. Sustainable” will contribute to a more crisis-resilient European Union.
Architectural education open to all, but especially to kids and young people, with a focus on local particularity and a view to global impacts contributes to the aim of fostering a peaceful, just, and ecologically stable world because it can offer not just a vast set of practical and theoretical knowledge in addition to that acquired in conventional schools, but it creates a sense of belonging, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of agency within the local urban and architectural setting it takes place. We at Aka | Architecture Kids Athens believe that children trained in architectural history, theory and design are better equipped in understanding, maintaining and adapting their own habitat towards positive ends and that they will become more resilient, responsible and active citizens fit for a challenged future.
Since its foundation in 2021, Aka | Architecture Kids Athens, has accomplished 5 major goals:
The first and most important of these goals was the planning and implementation of our own locally embedded studio space.
The second major goal accomplished was the programming of a diverse range of architectural workshops and seminars for children and young people from the ages of 3 to 14 years old. Having left behind the impact of Covid, our studio is brimming with activities of a growing audience from the neighbourhood and the city.
The third step was the establishment of social media channels in order to support our initiative. Our website, our newsletter, our Facebook and Instagram sites help us to communicate with our community locally and globally. The most import of these media-outlets is our YouTube channel. As described above, we have managed to turn it into the beginning of an audio-visual archive concerned with topics around childhood and architectural space.
The fourth achievement is our growing involvement with local public and private schools and kindergartens. So far, we have developed individual workshops and regular courses for a number of schools and kindergartens in Athens and elsewhere. We teach kids aspects of architectural history, theory and design or we use architectural topics in order to render subjects regularly taught more palpable through architecture.
Our fifth major achievement are our collaborations with institutions such as the Goethe Institut in Athens, Romantso Cultural Centre, the Hellenic Ministry of Sports and Education, and, most recently the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Our plan is to expand all of these achievements, foster collaborations, widen our audience and thus attract more supporters. A particular aim is to find international collaborators on a European level, our main motivation to be engaged in the New European Bauhaus.
At Aka | Architecture Kids Athens we share the belief that competences related to sustainability as outlined by the European competence framework on sustainability should be acquired by learners of all ages. It is vital for children’s and young people’s civic, personal and professional future to understand and value sustainability, fairness, as well as to gain a sense for the importance of not only keeping natural systems intact but to celebrate them. Our activities are designed to foster problem-framing capacities, to think and act critically within systems rather than isolated instances. Our workshops and seminars, as demonstrated above, specifically serve to gain competence in political agency, collective action and individual initiative. To envision and, most of all, to realize a sustainable future in times of global challenges requires futures literacy, that is thinking in projects, adaptability, the will to change for the better, as well as exploratory thinking, thinking like a designer. In other words, competence in sustainability requires the type of thinking and acting, we, as architectural educators, help children and young people to cultivate.
