![]() The ceiling-painted a dark blue-green, with glowing white pendant fixtures-is like an artificial sky. I thought of it like an Italian piazza, with multiple apertures looking into a central courtyard and borrowing its light. ID: How did you arrive at the idea for the double-height lobby space, which visually links the preschool to the after-school community spaces upstairs?ĪB: It’s sort of an indoor-outdoor experience. The double-height entryway of City Kids preschool in Williamsburg, its ceiling painted to evoke the night sky. In this case, the job is learning and gaining confidence. ![]() Anytime something is conceived to work specifically for a certain population, it turns the design into more of a background element by helping people do their job. ID: The half-height walls and other low elements seem designed with a toddler’s perspective in mind.ĪB: At 5 feet, 4 inches tall, I’m sensitive to things that are not the right height for me and always thinking about where a space becomes problematic because of the scale. Those adjustments have been integral to keeping the school open. Interior Design: How does City Kids rethink preschools for the COVID era?Īlexandra Barker: When construction paused at the beginning of the pandemic, we made some changes to address needs that were becoming clear: adding operable windows, increasing circulation flow, and finding ways to either contain or expand connections between rooms. Evidently, Barker’s knack for operating at the intersection of various ideas is exactly the approach that 2021 calls for. Meanwhile, as part of Design Advocates, a collective dedicated to pro-bono initiatives, Barker is helping Washington Heights businesses to embrace pandemic-savvy outdoor retail strategies and working on open-air learning spaces for Concourse House, a transitional housing shelter in the Bronx. City Kids, a recently completed Williamsburg preschool with COVID-friendly ventilation and a warm, domestic feel, is playfully scaled down to toddler proportions, yet also comfortably accommodates older students for after-school programming. “The pandemic has made me more aware of my surroundings, and how small things can have a big impact,” she says. With her ongoing community work, Barker considers an even broader range of experiences. Take, for instance, the cat staircase she thoughtfully incorporated in a Brooklyn row house’s built-in bookcase. Her firm, Barker Associates Architecture Office, has long embraced hybrid thinking, overlapping different scales and disciplines to develop flexible solutions that address multiple needs simultaneously. ![]() Shops shift their inventory between indoors and out, students shuffle between learning at school and at home, and social gatherings are as likely to occur in parks as in places of residence.įor Brooklyn-based architect Alexandra Barker, who is also the assistant chairperson of the graduate architecture and urban design program at Pratt Institute, these changes have made for fruitful-and not entirely unfamiliar-design challenges. Over the past 18 months, life as we know it has moved to an ever-fluctuating model. ![]()
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