What do children draw when they think of a house? A typical picture, particularly in the West, might be of a single-storey structure with a steep roof, a chimney and a big front door. Although researchers have tried to understand why such clich?s continue, architect Pihla Meskanen says similar images are rarely produced by her students at Arkki, Finland's only school of architecture for children and youth.
'They draw something absolutely different here,' she says. 'It's only when they go to [regular] school that they start to do this. I think it's because their teachers compliment the children who draw what they're supposed to draw and say: 'Very nice, it looks like a house'.'
Proof of the design creativity of children surrounded Meskanen on a bitingly cold day in February when children as young as five metaphorically donned hard hats to become builders. At Arkki, opened to the public as part of activities to celebrate Helsinki's designation as World Design Capital 2012, they created sprawling structures, some with extensions, many curiously angled, all inherently stable.
The workshop, called 'Sweet Architecture', had the students building with candy and toothpicks. 'The idea is to learn by doing,' says Meskanen, a practicing architect who co-founded Arkki in 1993. 'They're learning about construction, and they're learning about triangular structures.'
They are also learning to share and about restraint: by not eating the colourful pretend trusses they saw how, as Meskanen explains, 'triangular forms are very strong'.
Using architecture as a means to teach children social skills and about the building environment is something educators in many parts of the world are increasingly advocating, according to Dr Kumi Tashiro, a fellow at the University of Hong Kong who has conducted research into design education for children and, for the purposes of creating child-friendly cities, promoted their participation in urban planning through design work. Her interest in teaching design to children was sparked by studying school architecture and collaborating with teachers in her hometown of Sendai, Japan. There she helped devise design-led programmes aimed at raising students' interest in everything from history to science and language.
That experience, about a decade ago, was an enjoyable way into those subjects, according to two former students whom she met years later, when they were in their 20s. Neither had become an architect, but that was never the intention, according to Tashiro. 'Learning about the design process is a good way to learn about everything,' she says. 'It requires many different skills. You also learn how to communicate with other people.'