Architectural primer, or how to educate children about architecture

Wiktor Bochenek

20 of June '23

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How to teach children about architecture? This is a difficult challenge. Starting with the material, the language and also the form of knowledge transfer. An architectural primer can come to the aid of Sonia Pochopień and Bartłomiej Pochopień - architects and educators (Studio Styczna), who created the Architectural Primer of Tarnów.

Wiktor Bochenek: Why do we need architectural education from an early age? With all the problems we are facing, perhaps learning about architecture and urban planning is not so important after all?

Sonia Pochopień and Bartłomiej Pochopień: Well, yes, the problems around us are enormous, and each of them would like to be appreciated, noticed. Crises, deficits, collapses, small and large appeals for help keep fighting for our attention. A free market of ideas and issues trying to cut through the noise of information, media, advertising.

Frankly, we do it too, because we believe that this piece of reality, to which we are more sensitive, is simply very important. With that said, we also try not to absolutize what we do.

Sonia Pochopień

After all, a person who walks through the forest for several days would sooner sleep in the open air, give up building a shelter than have a meal or treat a wound. By this we mean to say that the people fighting to ensure that children don't go to school hungry in the morning or that we don't wait six months to see a specialist are more important than us architects and architectural educators, after all.

Well, but by placing matters concerning our everyday life in this way, on some kind of ladder of importance, we also want to make it clear that how people live, in which buildings they work and rest, we are positioning very, very high. Although objectively architecture, may not be the most important issue in the world, we have no doubt that it is one of those of extremely high rank of those from which there is no appeal. After all, on this trek through the woods, a shack has to be built eventually anyway - and sooner rather than later.

Bartłomiej Pochopień

And why is it necessary to work with children already?

Because once they reach adulthood, it's far too late to talk about fundamental issues. As we have already mentioned, architecture is one of those. You know, millions of Polish women and men make a surprisingly large number of decisions of an architectural nature in their lives - from choosing a design or designer or ordering a signboard or arranging a display in theirtheir store, to building a fence, arranging a garden, to, for example, doing nothing about the disastrous-looking facade of their apartment building - because, after all, doing nothing is also some kind of decision. To us, it seems ghastly that all this is happening among people who, by high school graduation alone, will have heard the word architecture maybe twice - that soaring Gothic and Romanesque style with small windows.

Besides, it doesn't seem to us at all that all will be well once the nation starts listening to architects and officials from architecture departments. After all, members of these two professional groups are blood of blood and bone of bone of the same nation, which is shaped by the same architectural landscape, the same art lessons in schools. Imagine, for example, a country with bad cooking. Well, it is impossible to change such a state of affairs by sending some small group of already properly adult people to a relatively short, five-year study of gastronomy. People who have brought negative culinary habits from home and school, but also ethical habits - that is, they don't have a sense of being in a profession of public trust of a certain stature - it won't really do much.

The project "Architectural Elementary of Tarnów" is a project carried out by the Academy of Architecture in cooperation with BWA Tarnów

You know, after all, all these monstrous spaces and buildings in our country were designed and sanctioned with seals by someone, and unfortunately it was done by professionals after graduation. It's just that they got the university indices in their hands already as grown-up people. Of course, at that time they were told how to draw a cross section and a longitudinal section, how to solve a sanitary junction, and that this was a prestigious profession.

Unfortunately, in their childhood, no one told them that architecture is just a very serious business. It's not even a matter of whether someone likes something, that here I say it's ugly in Poland and my neighbor says it's nice. Well, the Committee on Spatial Planning of the Country of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2019 calculated that the architectural and urban mess costs us 84.3 billion zlotys a year. For the sake of comparison, let's just say that in all of 2022, only 28 billion zlotys were spent on science and higher education.

The list of expenses related to the chaos is immeasurable: constant repairs to old roads and construction of new ones, costly installations, plow trucks circling the country, commuting to schools and clinics, traffic accidents, car repairs, compensation and, finally, treatment for the victims of this skyrocketing chaos. Yes, the issue is much more serious than an intense cacophony of forms and colors.

The project focuses on individual examples of architecture and urban planning from Tarnów

Wiktor: How do you actually reach children with the study of architecture? How do you encourage them to learn about this field?

Sonia, Bartholomew: This question can be understood in two ways - "how to reach children" in the sense of how to get them to be able to do classes and "how to reach", that is, how to speak to them, how to be understood.

The first issue is complex and would require a very long talk and a story about how we have conducted several hundred workshops, open-air sessions and lectures in several localities over the past few years. But it seems to us, however, that you are asking about this second thing - how to teach?

We may say something unpopular, but we believe that the question of architecture should not be oversimplified and simplified. Sure, it is necessary to address in a language that is understandable, not some gibberish jargon, but we are convinced that architecture should be spoken to children quite seriously - as something important, beautiful, fascinating, not trivialized. Of course, also without falling into elitism, exaltation and some kind of designer strain.

Kids should feel that this is an arch-important component of their world, but at the same time an everyday world, present at their fingertips. And it doesn't have to be, ba shouldn't be boring at all. Much depends on whether the storyteller of architecture himself considers it something valuable, knows what this architecture consists of, understands it and not just theoretically, on paper, seeing it through the resulting isms of art history.Personally, we also don't like this approach, that here let's play, that anyone can be an architect, you know, these kind of stories, that "become a little architect" or "and you can be a designer". This is, by design, a little unfair and probably unnecessary. Unfortunately, parents of kids often expect something like this. After all, you don't have to tell someone that they're a little doctor or that they're going to be a surgeon in order to teach them at school or in a museum lesson how the human body works.

The coloring books are accompanied by descriptions that provide information about the objects and their context

Wiktor: I'm looking through the coloring books you created with the support of BWA Tarnów. Here we have an overview of architecture from the Middle Ages to the 20th century - from churches to apartment blocks. Isn't there a lack of space here for the newest architecture?

Sonia, Bartholomew: In the Architectural Primer of Tarnów - which we have prepared one free copy for each kindergarten and elementary school in the city - broadly defined 20th-century modernity is represented by a few objects. But that's right, not one building from recent years is among them.

Well, in the boxes we distributed there were twenty cardboard boxes-matrices. They can be reproduced and, during classes, distributed to students for coloring, but also for reading together succinct, although simple in construction, sentences. Such, which tell about architecture, using basic concepts, facilitating the naming of what can be seen, what is or what used to be a given space. And unfortunately, in completing this set, we had to make quite a selection.

In addition to more traditional architecture, we find here examples from the 20th century

All this was done so that young viewers could be presented not only with the most diverse styles and entire eras stretching over hundreds of years, but also with the various functions, scales and areas of this, after all, vast and rich city. In addition, we wanted this limited number of shots to include truly significant subjects - important through their beauty, picturesqueness, unique proportions, or simply of special significance to a sizable group of people, such as the large-panel estate you mentioned, called the Falklands. To tell the truth, we did not think that any of Tarnów's newest buildings should necessarily be included among the city's emblems, a kind of lexicon of Tarnów's material heritage intended for the youngest something that would constitute a package of basic, elementary knowledge about architecture.

Of course, this does not mean that in our educational activities the latest times do not interest us. As a matter of fact, we devote a great deal of time to them. We are happy to talk about them during architectural open-airs or workshops. However, contemporaneity - by its nature difficult to grasp and not easy to define - always requires a more complex commentary. Such an opportunity is provided by our classes with slightly older, teenage youth and adults. In addition to this, we happen to devote a specific dose of reflection to the present day within the framework of drawing essays published on YouTub in the series Architecture Potok and Shapes of Tarnów.

The coloring books are also available on the BWA website

Wiktor: Your coloring books are placed in the specific context of Tarnów, and can the archives be accessed by parents or teachers with kids from other localities?

Sonia, Bartholomew: Of course they can. Of course, the coloring books themselves can be used by someone from the vicinity of Zywiec or Lomza, downloaded from the web and given to a child to color a beautiful villa from Mościce or a thermal power plant while introducing the child to the word modernity, monumentalism or intimacy. When we founded the Academy of Architecture in 2016, our big dream, our ambition was to operate in different, preferably small and medium-sized towns. What is there to say, with a lot of determination we managed to do it and conducted more than four hundred meetings - cyclical and individual, in schools and community centers of such places as Olesno, Słomniki, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Bochnia, Krakow, Imielin, Wadowice, Mikołów, Mysłowice, Olkusz and Tarnów.

It's the case that a class in the center of Cracow is most likely to be attended by someone from Cracow, a walk along the trail of Żoliborz modernism by a child from a Warsaw intelligentsia home, while at thethose organized in a small town will come either someone from that locality, or from a neighboring village - he will drive up by bus or on a bicycle, he will be dropped off by a parent. And it is insanely important to act on the ground. After all, we will not say anything revealing, reminding that Poland is in fact, in the general horizon rural and small-town.

moscow thermal power plant

So we are very eager to go to different places and talk about architecture, precisely so that this knowledge ceases to be niche, urban-centric, elitist. So that it finally ceases to be associated with what most often appears on Internet portals, in the context of architecture - with some eccentric houses of ambitious architects who willingly serve wealthy investors.

Our "provincial" Architecture Stream also has such ambitions. In it we look for county and municipal places, definitely far from Warsaw or Krakow. Well, we think it's important for someone from Gorlice to find out why the building standing at his place in the market has such and not a different canopy, and for the residents of a postmodern housing estate in Olkusz to hear where such a specific form of their houses came from.

market square from a bird's eye view

Victor: Do you plan to develop it further? What are your plans for the future as the Academy of Architecture?

Sonia, Bartholomew: The Tarnów primer was created at the turn of this year and last year. We capped the event with a small conference, to which we invited representatives of all elementary schools and kindergartens. This meeting with educators - at the BWA Gallery, which supports us very well - was crucial for us.

After all, a couple of years ago we did a similar tool for the Pszczyna district, limiting ourselves to sending out material to the establishments, to their secretariats. Unfortunately, the response was much less than in Tarnow, and the secretariats turned out to be the weak link in the whole campaign. This was a lesson for us. We realized that in order to get the knowledge of architecture to the kids, we first need to talk to their teachers, to convince them that this is an important issue, that we have a big problem with the landscape. Well, even if it is just one of the many problems that are fighting for our attention these days.

grand staircase

As for future plans, on the other hand, yes, we have a desire to develop the activities of the Academy of Architecture and the idea of the Elementary, which, we strongly believe, teaches how to see and understand architecture. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this idea is related to what you can read about in Władysław Strzemiński's famous Theory of Seeing.

Strzeminski wrote: "In the process of seeing, it is not what the eye mechanically grasps that is important, but what man realizes from his seeing. The growth of visual awareness is thus a reflection of the process of human development."

So the issue seems simple. How and what we look at directly shapes us and determines our development. Well, and that puts a special obligation on us to engage in this work. Because, you know, it's probably the case that, in general, the ability to see well must be, we think, not inconsiderable also in view of perceiving a whole host of other issues and crises, the ones we mentioned at the beginning. We simply, as a society, need to learn to look carefully - and not just at architecture.

Victor: Thank you for the interview.