Situated within Poblenou’s landscape of industrial reuse, the project explores how Barcelona’s culture of making can be democratised through an architecture developed for its youngest citizens. Drawing upon the district’s history of fabrication, repair and collective production, the nursery explores how play can be accommodated within the fabric of a building, challenging the more traditional ‘instructive’ play equipment available in local playgrounds by fostering spaces open for reinterpretation and appropriation. Through attention to the child’s experience with scale, the building invites its 3 to 6 year-old occupants to take ownership of the space and develop a curiosity in their built surroundings.

The building brings together childcare, workshops, parents’ coworking spaces and a public café around a shared courtyard, creating opportunities for exchange between children, parents, makers and the wider community. Through inhabitable, ‘carved’ walls, and spaces of collective making, the project proposes a civic model of early-years education in which cultural heritage is transmitted through use, participation and everyday experience rather than preservation alone.