Architecture for kids podcast with Alex Raher Co-founder Delve Architects

I have a passion for how we learn and experience the world through the education we are given, and our interaction with people from the earliest age. I’m very interested in the podcast to continue my own learning and how we can continually improve as designers of educational spaces!

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Alex Rea. Alex is an architect and co-founder of Delve Architects, who specialise designing educational spaces that are playful, fun and engaging to learn in. He has worked across the UK delivering a range of educational, residential and community projects and as a specialist in designing sustainable, low-carbon nurseries. As co-founder of Dell, Alex leads on projects at multiple scales, from smaller public arts projects, new-build schools, retrofit of listed buildings, and large-scale school master planning. Alex, thank you for coming to talk to me today, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. What subjects were you good at school, and what subjects did you enjoy most at school, if they were different?

SPEAKER_01: 1:42

My My favourite subjects through school were art, math probably, languages and actually music too. I enjoyed quite a range of studies at school and I quite enjoyed the way, the breadth that gave you from an educational point of view. And I think my most enjoyable subject was probably linguistics, understanding about different cultures and experiencing how people live in different countries and different environments. But yeah, probably a key focus was art and mathematics and that's what I got When did you realise you wanted to be an architect and what

SPEAKER_00: 2:21

do you support?

SPEAKER_01: 2:22

Probably through studying art, I guess. And that was my first initial introduction to architecture and the built environment. Living so close to London also was a big inspiration. I naturally thought that an interest in mathematics and art lent itself towards a career in the construction industry and the built environment. That sort of evolved into seeing what architecture is. and how architects work with people, how we problem solve and use that creative side of our brains as well. From a support, I guess it was an interesting career. It's no wonder my family has ever studied or been an architect. Actually, my family have been involved in education. My mom and sister are both teachers. So I was involved from quite an early age in the educational world. It probably is one of the first things that catalyzed my interest in architecture and education together. Do you

SPEAKER_00: 3:12

want to talk about Delve Architects and how they came to be focused in educational projects?

SPEAKER_01: 3:19

Delve was founded in 2017 by myself and my business partner, Aidan Martin. We both actually grew up together in Buckinghamshire, just outside London. We would also study at school and had the sort of art interest and art classes together. So I think that was the catalyst, those early conversations when we were 15, 16, about being architects and even discussing, starting to practice It's been on our minds for many years and got to a point when we both trained and qualified and worked elsewhere, where we decided we wanted to take a leap, I guess, and start a practice, both having a strong interest in education. And one of the first projects we completed together was a school project in Buckinghamshire called the Little Hall. It was a new build school dining facility for a primary school. And that was introduced through the government initiative to bring school home. up-school food and do this to all children under a certain age so that school may need to expand and build a new facility. So we worked on that together and it was really successful. I guess it kind of catalyzed and made us realize that we could work together and that we both had a real passion for educational design and that project really started. From there, we've moved forward and we're now a practice of 10 working from London Bridge. But yeah, that is probably those early conversations as school friends to be honest about what we wanted to do in the future and then we realised it 10-15 years later. You do a lot of

SPEAKER_00: 4:52

design work for nursery school. Is there a particular project that you want to talk about or the design process that takes place?

SPEAKER_01: 5:00

Our key niche I guess that we work in is early years education so we deliver a lot of nursery schools and early years nurseries across London and England and we found that a lot of the projects tend to be fictile shell spaces so we're actually looking at former commercial units warehouses and former doctor surgeries even pubs that have fallen into disrepair or are underused and are being converted into educational facilities we sort of take these shell units and look at internal fictile but from an educational standpoint and we work quite closely with the nursery schools to understand how they operate how they use the space Things like safeguarding, obviously materiality, sustainability. We quite carefully understand how children use a nursery, how they play, how they learn. And we're really passionate about that. So yeah, I think in terms of a particular project, there's maybe a few that come to mind. One that we've recently completed over in Romford in East London was to fit out of about a 5,000 square foot four warehouse. It was an industrial space completely unused so it took it back to shell and brought quite a sort of material and nature-led sustainable approach to the fit out where we avoided any plasterboard and we we used timber walls throughout lots of glazing we tried to drop the heights of everything down so that the sidelines across the floor plan were designed in with the mind of a two or three year old or with the sort of average height of a young person in mind while the other key concepts were was the way we looked at how children use space and how they interact with space. And often you can find a circulation for children that happens in circles or in a circular movement. They like to explore in quite an organic and natural way. So we removed all corridors from the floor plan. It's quite a simple rectangular floor plan. So what we did is classrooms around the perimeter with a central core, which acts as an adaptable dining performance and multi-use of flexibles space and every space leads out from that central central part of the plan and that was quite a key concept so removing corridors and removing long dark circulation routes and allowing a bit more free flow that's been really successful and it allows a bit more flexibility and how a nursery operates and the kind of range they can take and the way that the children use the space in the daily this knowledge that you

SPEAKER_00: 7:38

just talked about is it precedence or do

SPEAKER_01: 7:40

you do case

SPEAKER_00: 7:40

studies

SPEAKER_01: 7:41

it's led through engage with the client. Sometimes we've been out to see former nurseries or current nurseries that they have, spend some time, you know, three or four hours just in the space, watching how children interact with each other, with the built environment, with the space itself. And that informs some of our design decisions, but we're also quite careful not to be too prescriptive in what we put into the space. I think it's really important to allow children to adapt and use space in the way they see fit rather than the way an adult sees it and you might think as a designer you're creating something for a child but actually the way the child uses that space is very different. We have to be careful in that sense. There's a really interesting video from something that comes to mind a symbols video for the Venice Biennale in 2017 I think it's just about play and how children play in the city how children play in playgrounds and what provision we make for how children can play in an environment and it's it's called the voices of of children i think it's really important to think that way and it translates from from the early years design nurseries is such an important level of of childhood and education but all the way through up to how you know how children use the city and the space do we give good to children how they use it so yeah we try we do research yeah how children are are perceived and how the space are perceived by young people but we try and be quite organically led by that. And I guess it's sometimes a bit more about what you've done clearly in the States than what you do to allow them a bit more freedom

SPEAKER_00: 9:21

to explore. In Finland, play becoming so important. Yeah, nurseries, being pedagogies so important in the early years. How does your design cater for that?

SPEAKER_01: 9:31

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think there's a lot of research across some of the Scandinavian countries and also there's other places like the way the Japanese also look at nurseries schools and education there's an amazing example of Japanese nursery school which is circular and has a rooftop kind of garden playground space where the children actually they do running in circles and they use the space in a circular form and they've actually managed to create a completely open plan floor plate internally which you would think would become acoustically really difficult would allow too much cross movement between different classes and different age ranges but actually they've found that it's really successful children like to stay in the zone that they know they understand where their peers are and where their friends are and the kind of zoning of their class so I think it's interesting to look at things like that in a way as an architect how we might try and define spatial order and what would be traditionally thought of as a classroom space or yeah how children should play or use space and I think actually you can flip it on the head quite a lot and think conversely about if you were a child what would you want and how would you want to use a space and I think it's really difficult to do that as an adult because we're so we're so conditioned to think in a certain way and I think we've it's almost impossible to keep that childhood way of imagining imagination and play and sort of un predefined conceptions of the world when children play it's very present it's very in the moment and I think as an adult we've kind of lost that we like to think we can think in that way but realistically we can't so from our side I guess from how yeah to answer maybe the question about how we design we're very much led by the client as well because the specific location and type of building we're working on varies obviously between each site at the moment we're doing some interesting work on some new build nurseries with actually some intergenerational care working with elderly people and young people and seeing how sort of symbiosis of those relationships are really intriguing there's a lot of research about that but other projects have been things like converted Victoria houses turned into nurseries over four or five levels and that brings the same challenges with yeah how children use the space so I think it's unique on a site by site basis but we are informed by sort of why that Yeah, water research.

SPEAKER_00: 12:13

I'm really interested in this intergenerational aspect that you just talked about. And do you vote a little taller into the design process and if you do, how does that work?

SPEAKER_01: 12:22

We do, and we have held workshops with young people and we've created booklets, designed your own nursery. We've had feedback from existing nurseries who are looking to expand into larger units or new units and had some amazing ideas. And I guess it's quite difficult from an early, early age from one to two. You can't quite get the engagement you might get from a primary school student, six, seven, eight, nine. But the toddlers, the sort of preschoolers at three and four, four and a half, are really aware, I think, of the environment they're in and they're really astute to what you're bringing. So we have done that. At times it's been through physically being in the space and talking to toddlers rather than actually getting written feedback. But we have also had some really amazing little sketches and yeah we do we do evolve them we are working with some older students and some SEND stores as well so we're doing a slightly different approach with that when you've got children of obviously an older age you can do a bit more engagement I think that's a really interesting point to touch on as well as how much we do listen to young people and teenagers and there was a really interesting statistic from one of your earlier podcasts a lady who was the architect of the Great Ormond Street Hospital about 25% of the Londoners being under 18. I was quite astounded by that. A quarter of the population of London is under 18 and generally I think that's quite an underrepresented group. If you think how do people of that age actually have a voice and how do they get heard? I think it's really important that we think a bit more about how we listen to teenagers and young people about what they need and what they want rather than sort of prescribing what they need and telling them how to learn and what they need to learn and what career they have to take on it's such an amazing part of your life being an early child and teenager you need to allow a bit more freedom to explore what's possible so yeah it's probably a slight diversification but and then touching on the intergenerational care it's fascinating we've started working with an amazing client in the north of England who who are actually providing care home provision in synergy with early years care and they've decided to create this relationship between the elderly and the young people of the community and one of their key approaches to this is that care homes shouldn't be seen as something completely separate to society and shouldn't be seen as this individual element where elderly people will go to be just cared for and not seen. They see it as a real community and part of the development is a really pioneering approach to how beneficial early years can be to people who are very elderly and on the converse how beneficial elderly people can be to young people and I think you can see it through the relationship of children with their grandparents. It's lovely really And they already have a few sites, and they see how operationally it works successfully. They hold workshops. They do art classes, therapy. The children recognize the elderly people on the site, and equally, it works the other way around. And you get these spontaneous interactions that children have with adults that adults don't really give to other adults because they're too, maybe, if I should say, too perceived in their ideas. No one really judges an elderly person a child doesn't judge and no one declares something like maybe it and how it might so it's fascinating and we're also looking spatially how we arrange these nurseries whether they're integrated with care homes if they're separate maybe they're new build properties and also in particular looking at the external space and how the play element of these nurseries interacts with the care home so there's some intriguing design ideas about allotments and nature bird watching forest school the idea of play being a bit more integrated into the natural environment, and I think there's also a real synergy between how elderly people can help teach younger people about things like growing food and their experience of the world. So it's a really

SPEAKER_00: 16:58

interesting thing. When you were talking, I was thinking about my parents and their grandchildren, and then as well as when my mum got diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the thing that took years to relax her was actually all being... adult she carried around this door for almost until she died. It'd be really interesting to see the progress of the work.

SPEAKER_01: 17:19

Yes, the Alzheimer's discussion and dementia care, we are doing a little bit of work with a charity down in the New Forest. Again, amazing charity, but Spudworks, who do arts and community data for projects for architecture and education linked together, and how community work can, I guess, help people experience architecture and together but one of the projects we've been working with them on is the pavilion for dementia care and it's there's just yeah lovely sort of research about how to how to help people suffering with that with Alzheimer's or dementia and the kind of spaces you can you can create and the calmness and the almost dying from home aspect and again that that centers you with how young people can can help alleviate that as well it is amazing so so yeah we're really really inspired by a lot of As

SPEAKER_00: 18:14

he was speaking, I was thinking about modernism and an exhibition I just saw at WIBA. Our modernism is kind of not really pay attention to children. And you talked about agency for children. How do you think we're going to go about to make that happen?

SPEAKER_01: 18:30

In modernism, and I guess giving space to children is really interesting. I think that comes from probably the commercialization of space. of the city and I guess unfortunately when you're doing something in a city usually it's a commercial act and often there's not that kind of space between just to experience the urban environment in a really free way and that probably is where playgrounds come in really. Playgrounds, adventure playgrounds and set spaces for children to play are really a byproduct of the fact that we've created cities that aren't safe for children to be And so we create these little pockets in our communities where we say, there you go, go and play in there. It's safe. We can watch you. These are the equipments you can play on. This is what you can do. You can swing. You can jump up and down. But actually, really, what would be better, I think, is if we just were able to create environments that were safe, that didn't have danger of toxic waste or any risks for children in a certain environment. environment and let them be free and actually as an adult I think it's more important to be a bit more invisible than hands-on constantly and we can learn a lot by just seeing children play in the woods or you know adventure playground spaces there's a lovely there's a lovely playground in Kew Gardens it's it's pretty incredible it's a lot of work the dumping grove do these beautiful structures but yeah I think it's a little bit more a guide in allowing allowing that freedom of expression for children which is so important and I think it's really difficult to find that in a really tight urban environment, sort of commercialised urban environment. But it's not to say there are no opportunities. There are so many little in-between spaces that could be afforded for young people to explore. I guess we maybe just need to look at the commercial side of the city in a slightly different way and can we repurpose commercial space in a more positive, educational way and I guess we've been We've been looking at that a little bit and exploring it and researching it for the work we're doing with nurseries and even recently discussed this with London Sport, converting it to retail units and like for more sort of community positive pressure instead.

SPEAKER_00: 21:01

What do you think is the impact on the built environment as well as on the children, the work you're doing in nurseries and, you educational project.

SPEAKER_01: 21:13

I guess this is where we can start to think a little bit more about the educational system and what we see is important for children to learn and what actually they're going to make and eat. And this gets a bit deeper into what the children of the Greek and society and letting them be heard and experience the world in a way that actually is a bit more organic from such an early age. I think it's really important to allow that for from sort of toddler age all the way through to teenager and not to sort of pre-describe what should be done, educationally and in the built environment. And then I guess as an impact on, yeah, how children use space that we've been designing, it's interesting. I suppose we've done a lot of nurseries now. We've worked to a lot of early days settings and One of the key things we try and bring in is this idea of natural materials, sustainability, and a bit of a deeper connection to the natural world. Whether that's just a simple intervention and being able to see outside, trying to create more external states, or whether it's to do with the actual materiality of the internal space and how they're learning about what they touch and feel and see on a daily basis. That's kind of one of our key approaches. Often in London, you find that we're Most of these spaces have limited gardens. It's very rare to have an expansive play area in a nursery in the city. So you've got to be a bit more creative about what can be used. We've done pub conversions that he had sadly on pubs anymore because that's another thing that's happened quite recently. But, you know, we've created a soft play in nurseries where they haven't got as much external play. So they've still got space to explore and be themselves. And that's our energy, even in tight environments. I feel that the nursery setting is quite interesting as it often sits within a wider commercial space in the city. We've done projects that are in the base of a 15-story tower near the Thames in Royal Wharf and it's such an important element to society itself. It's so needed, there's such a high demand for it as well that we're not going to get away from it. It's something that needs to be provided more and more. There's a new initiative recently come out from the government that offers more funded places for children from 18 months old, which is really great. But the problem is that often most nurseries can't afford or can't take on more children that have capacity. So the more and more we think about it, the more these nursery spaces are intertwined in our environment, in the built spaces that we occupy and use. And it's something that we've tried to do in some of these commercial spaces is make them more accessible make them more open to areas adjacent to them so although there's an element of safeguarding and making sure people can't always see inside nurseries I think it's really important that these aren't hidden away they're not tucked into the back of commercial areas that actually they're open to the environment near them that children can see see out see nature see see what's around them and be part of that urban space. So I think that's how nurseries sort of affect the built environment. And I think how we could maybe improve on that is to think a bit more about what a child of a certain age experiences, even from their journey towards school, towards nursery. How do we get there? How do we access it? How do we travel to these spaces? And what do they do on their way, on their journey? What's the way for And that goes all the way from a one and two year old all the way up to 16, 17, 18 and into higher education. So yeah, I think it's a really important focal point of the built environment and what we can offer to society. As we touched on earlier, it's critical to give younger people a voice to be heard and not just design what we think is necessary for them. And I think there's a really good shift towards that. You see a bit more in award recognition recently and the Sterling Prize and educational projects that are recognised properly for largest architectural merit and I think that's a really nice shift and it feels like it's moving in.

SPEAKER_00: 25:56

In terms of nursery design, how are we in terms of the pantry in working similarly in the way you do? What inspires you and what motivates you to do this work?

SPEAKER_01: 26:08

As a country, I think we well, you currently we have one of the highest childcare costs in Europe I think we're the third highest in Europe if not the world and it's something we've written about and talked about quite a lot it's quite difficult for parents to juggle the idea of childcare versus going back to work say post maternity leave because childcare costs are so high and this is probably touching a bit more on political discourse and government financing for nurseries, but it is a really important thing to consider because it's such a critical age. It's not really child care. It is actually education at early years, and it's really important to understand that. It's not a place where children are just looked after for eight, nine hours a day. It's a fundamental part of your career pre-school education and children learn those three key skills. So as a country I personally think we should be doing more for recognising the importance of nurseries and the importance of nursery teachers and settings and what they do for thousands and thousands of children who go there every day and start their early attention. So I actually think there's probably an argument to discuss a deeper retrofit strategy for a nationwide approach to old commercial disused buildings for conversion into nursery spaces considering there's such high demand why can you zero rate a new build residential project but you can't retrofit a nursery and zero rate the VAT on that would be something just to consider where's the benefit in that to the community if we want to look at retrofit housing which is great is how to real push forward in the last three, four, five years. I think we should be looking at this from a commercial standpoint as well. Understanding that educational buildings aren't just schools, universities and higher education. It is an early years nursery sector as well. And if you can offer a financial incentive and an additional level of funding, which is coming in for September next year, but we need the extra stakes. So Yeah, I think as a country, we need to probably think about this a little bit wider rather than sort of on a smaller scale. What inspires? Yes, I think our inspiration comes from the way children use the space and seeing completed projects that we've done working as successful nurseries and seeing children enjoying and bringing joy into a space. There's nothing more inspiring than a happy child playing in a space that you've been involved in and designed. Like I said earlier, it's not just us. There's a massive team involved in the delivery of these projects. But certainly, the opportunity it creates and the benefit and potential it offers to young people is a huge inspiration for us as a practice.

SPEAKER_00: 29:30

In your opinion, how important is play in children's life and how much are we taking that into consideration as a society?

SPEAKER_01: 29:38

I think it's critical. I think it's something that can't be can't be underestimated. There's a great quote in the video I referred to earlier, Assemble's video, Vince Biennale, Voice of the Children, play simply prepares you for future unpredictability. And play is something that children do without fear of failure. And they don't, they're told what to do so much in school, how we expect them to behave, what we expect them to become when they are able to play it's a complete freely injurious expression of their inner self and I think it's really critical I think actually something that if we don't focus on this I'm not sure we understand yet what the consequences could be in you know for the future generations 10 15 50 years time so so yeah I think it's really fundamental it's I think we've always understood the benefit play and but when you see a child play if you if you looked in an adventure playground It's such an interesting dynamic. They learn so many social skills in the way they're actually interacting with others, with people, with equipment, with their environment. And they learn how to take risks. And I think that's really important too. They know how to fail because then they learn how to pick themselves up and do it again and what decisions to make the next time that don't result in failure. And often when we're in situations with children, they're slightly less safe in or near a road or even, you know, in school, you're telling them what to do and how not to fail, how to be safe, how to stay risk-free, whereas play lets a child explore those risks and that dynamic of being a young person without that preconceived idea of the world and those dangers that us as adults constantly consider. So I think it's really critical and, yeah, we should be looking at it more as a society, sure. Is that a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you and what is that question? I guess the architect's role in educational design and it involves such a wider team. I think you touched on this quite interestingly about the research and what we're informed by, what kind of precedence we take in our work and what inspires us. I think that's really important. The wider team are involved in all projects really, in all kind of set It's so vast. And I think what kind of inspires me as an architect is you're not the only person involved in this. There's a huge chain of people. There's a huge chain of stakeholders involved in a project. And the nice thing with education is the people you're designing for, it's a wide network of individuals, such a diverse community of individuals you could use, but space isn't an urban area in a completely unique way. So there's no real, I think there's no real right answer to how architects should design it for education I think it's just really important that we listen and that's probably my biggest takeaway from thinking about how we work with younger people in nurseries and even sort of older educational settings it's just yeah just being there and listening and allowing everyone to have a voice rather than sort of trying to put too much into a space so again what you take out or what you leave for open expression and freedom is more important than what you put in so I think that's really important and maybe something we should explore more. From a policymaking point of view and a wider urban planning, again, that's the same sort of thing. How do we create these more diverse and free spaces for children in a city that's so commercialized? Do we need to create spaces for it or do we actually need to just leave spaces in between that can be occupied in a way that sort of naturally works for younger people? We just need... safer spaces in between that aren't specifically used in a certain commercial way that has to be paid for or has to be used at a certain time of day. So, yeah, it's an intriguing, intriguing thought.

SPEAKER_00: 33:59

Thanks very much for having me. Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family. And to find out more about it, visit our websites. Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.