A Book on Making a Petite Ecole

Description

A compendium of children's design exercises by architects from around the world accompany illustrations and photographs documenting the construction of the Petite Ecole pavilion. As part of the 2019 Biennale d'architecture et de paysage in Versailles, France, MOS constructed Petite Ecole, a small, open-air pavilion to house educational workshops for children. It is a place for looking and making, and for making and looking, constructed with 688 aluminum pieces modeled, flattened, cut, folded, prefabricated, shipped, and then assembled onsite. It is made to be taken down and reassembled elsewhere. It is designed to be easily understood, made of simple building elements: a long, low roof with columns and stacked beams holding it up. Undertaken during various design workshops, single page design exercises written by architects were assembled into a large book and given to children. A Book on Making a Petite Ecole features an expanded collection of these exercises. Each exercise includes playful illustrations of its steps, starting a conversation about how designers look at, think about, teach, and imagine the foundations of design. Alongside these, the design process of the pavilion is included, as its own design exercise, from colorful illustrations of each step of the pavilion's construction, to actual construction photographs and photographs of the completed pavilion being occupied. A Book on Making a Petite Ecole considers basic questions of design pedagogy, abstraction, accessibility, experimentation, and equity, while considering and reconsidering architecture.

Michael Meredith, along with Hilary Sample, is a principal of MOS, an internationally recognized architecture practice based in New York, and Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture. Hilary Sample is the IDC Professor of Housing Design at Columbia University GSAPP, and co-founder of the New York-based architecture and design studio MOS.