We don’t actually design architecture during our studies. We design the representation of architecture. We usually do not put one stone on top of another, build walls or buildings. We only draw lines on paper or the screen, which we then recognize as walls or buildings. A museum is a very special use in which architecture plays a very important role because the works of art often only look right when they are displayed in the right space and in perfect light. This makes museums almost holy places. A child sees it very differently. For a child, there are no sacred spaces. If the Staatsgalerie were to be expanded to include a primary school, what would happen? How does a child see the way to school, and how does the child find it looking through a hole in the Staatsgalerie? What does that do to the exhibition and the visitors to the gallery?
In the course of the studio, I often asked myself whether it wouldn’t make more sense to thematize and represent such questions than to simply draw a floor plan. After all, a primary school is not about what exactly the classrooms will look like because we have all seen classrooms in the past, but rather about the intimate moments of a child’s growing up in contrast to a huge educational system that is supposed to turn playful children into working adults and sometimes forgets the self-development of the children.