city furniture

I have finished yet another set of lessons. This time I’ve been on one of the main squares of Gothenburg talking about and experimenting with the city’s furniture together with kids (ages 7-12). It’s been so much fun and I’ve seen so many epiphanies dawn in their curious and interested little faces. But instead of teasing you with what it’s about I’ll just come out and tell you all about it. This is what we did:

In the middle of Gustav Adolfs Torg (The Square of king Gustavus Adolphus) there is a big statue of said king in the middle. I meet the class by this statue sitting on one of four chairs I brought specially for the occasion. On the ground in front of me I’ve placed a cute little carpet, and I have a tiny table by my side as if I just had a cup of coffee but cleared the table. The four chairs stand in a row to form a bench.

My introduction is about the square, the only square in town that’s been a square since Gothenburg was founded in 1621. I tell the class about how the site for the new city was decided by Dutch merchants who built a small port, and since they earned money for Sweden the king let the new city be laid out where they wanted. This is why Gothenburg is situated in the only big mud hole along the granite west coast of Sweden…

I then change direction. I tell them we are no longer in the city of Gothenburg, but the castle of Gothenburg, where plazas and squares are rooms and the streets hallways and corridors combining these rooms. Now, what sort of room is the square we’re in? Most kids agree it’s a salon or a living room. Because, as one kid said, “This is where you take your guests and say ‘look how beautiful’, and then you go hang out somewhere else”. Nobody really uses the fancy room. Clever. They have also come up with the ideas that Liseberg, our amusement park, is the playroom, and a popular square for food carts and cafés is the kitchen…

In the pavement of the square there’s an inlay “map” out of cobble stone and pavement slabs forming the map of Gothenburg as it was in 1644. It’s the fancy carpet of the fancy room. We discuss the map for a bit, about where the city wall was, how small the city once was and so on.

After the history lesson we move on to geometry and math. By holding a rope between them, four kids get to form a square shape representing the living room of one of them. We then estimate how many normal sized living rooms can fit in the living room of king Gustavus Adolphus. The number has ranged in between 180 and 300. The square is huge! But along the edges of the square we only find 13 benches all in all. And they seem to be placed there to work as a border rather than for seating. No wonder people don’t use this square too much. It’s about to change…

We move back to my four chairs and a drama lesson. We act out a scene from a central station where the train is late. One by one three students get to populate my “bench”, and without knowing they all obey the social rules of occupying seats on a bench. You always try and sit as far away from everyone else as possible. Eventually I take the last seat, demonstrating the benefit of forcing strangers on one another on benches, since we now start talking to each other about the train being late, the weather or whatever. Kids ooh and aah a lot during this portion of the lesson.

Then we move beyond the bench. What happens if we all get to choose where to sit? Four students get a chair each and the assignment to find their favourite spot somewhere on the square and go sit there. People laugh and yell “Bye, bye!” as class mates spread over the square. Then we pay each chair a visit, and its occupant gets to explain why he or she chose that particular spot. They leave the chairs where they are and we go back to the statue, and we look at what has happened. With four chairs the square has transformed, since new places have formed around them. And you can see that somebody has cared about being comfortable and feeling at home on an otherwise not so populated place. A funny extra benefit of the exercise is that these chairs often are occupied by passers by in the mere minutes they get to stand around and about… More seats are obviously needed.

Then I tell them about Barcelona where they actually furnish the city by letting people tell where and how they want to sit, and by using chairs rather than benches. You can find chairs standing in groups or by themselves, facing walls or sidewalks. Most of all the chairs standing opposite each other make a difference, since, let’s face it, it’s not easy to spend time together as a group sitting on a line…

The point of the lesson has not been to make kids run around the city with chairs, but to make them start questioning how the city’s design is planned, and can you do otherwise? I really do believe that with combined efforts making kids think for themselves, we’ll live in a more beautiful city in the future, with more people asking us architects “Why?”

I really do have the best job ever… If only I got rich doing it too…
Here's my little company's website too - though still only availible in Swedish.