More details behind the IS ARCH 5th edition first-prize winner

"Growing Besides Nature" is a children's center designed by Alejandra Salvador from CEU San Pablo University. Salvador won first prize in the recently concluded IS ARCH Awards 5th edition, which serves as an international platform for young architects to engage in healthy architectural debate and learn to formulate their own perspectives.

Immersed in bright-colored trees, the children's center emphasizes playtime as a natural and essential part of childhood and child development. Check it out below.

Project board description:

"We know that children play, not only because they like it, but also because they have the need to do it. The game in not just one kind of children acivity, it is also the basic child behaviour."

"They play because they want an internal motivation that pushes them to rehearse actions and interpretation of themselves and their enviroment."

"Playing is to the children a vital experience wich possibility them to tansform, create other worlds, live others lives, play to be others while never ceasing to be themselves, think like others and, above all, discover that there are other ways to think and feel. During the game they are tested, they practice, they confirm, they reject..."

"Playing is so necessary that those who do not play or play just a bit can reduce or even block their growing process. Although playing is a natural push, it needs some conditions of material spaces and moments. Will these conditions which relate the project with the user. The starting point for every space of this children’s center."

More project images in the thumbnails below.

See the rest of the IS ARCH 5th edition winners here.