Architectural Thinking School for Children

The Architectural Thinking School for Children is a think tank composed of children and an interdisciplinary team of professionals. It operates at the intersection of experimental pedagogy and a wide range of disciplines, using architectural thinking as a tool to promote children as full-fledged participants in the intellectual and artistic adult world. The School was founded in 2016 by the architect Alexander Novikov and the art critic and designer Elena Karpilova, as an institution of supplementary education. The school is located in Lisbon, Portugal. The Architectural Thinking School for Children teaches architectural thinking as a tool for understanding the modern global world. We took the architect's work as a model, since they possess a huge range of knowledge and skills: they are good at conducting research, using knowledge from completely different disciplines, creating projects, and presenting them to the public. The systems thinking possessed by a professional architect is what we call architectural thinking. The school has more than 16 studios: architecture, contemporary art, sculpture, object design, journalism, graphic design, psychology, biology, sociology, political science, economics, etc. Classes relating to all of the studios take place within one common, interdisciplinary program of study and are conducted by expert practitioners in the relevant fields. The school program is designed for 7 years of study and is organized in accordance with the principle of “one year, one course”. School courses: “Development”, “Systems Thinking”, “Interdisciplinarity-1, 2”, “City Research”, and “Professions-1, 2”. Each course is divided into four quarters. During each of the quarters, the student completes classes in different studios and, in the end, creates one final project: a book, a film, a map of the city, etc.