2013

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Kinderkrippe Anton-Geisenhofer-Straße 7, 81825 München

Buchenholz lackiert

2 x 300 lacquered beechwood, pivoting rods, aluminum tubes
Wall niche: 214 cm x 239 cm x 10 cm
Wooden bars: 17 cm x 1 cm x 2 cm

Architecture: Landherr Architekten, München

Photos: Thilo Härdtlein

Text: Heinz Schütz

Afra Dopfer’s ornamental fields set accents of color in the white and gray play space at the daycare center, while also opening up a visual playroom that invites children to participate. As originally designed, the elements of the changeable ornaments—with their serially repeated sequences of green, green, red on the ground floor and red, red, green on the second floor—visually function like the lines of an image. In fact, however, they are short, colored wooden rods that can pivot on their own axes. Every time they are turned in a different direction, the image changes, producing another constellation of lines, and the number of possible variations and alterations is infinite.

The ornament Afra Dopfer designed as a starting point is strictly geometrical and clearly constructed, yet it can be read in many different ways, visually: the eye can follow the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal colored lines, or the image can be viewed as flat (the sum of triangles with circular vertices), as section made up of rhombuses, or—probably the first interpretation to catch the eye—as a juxtaposition of hexagons. Viewing them three-dimensionally changes the hexagons into cubes.

The pivoting colored rods, which resemble a set of building blocks, invite children to tinker with the image and playfully re-shape it. Since the length of children’s arms is short and the upper row of the original ornament lies outside of their reach, the range of the children’s activity can be seen: in the upper section, the strictly geometrical order remains the same, while in the area where the children can play chaos or a new order can be created, or the original ornament can be recreated following the pattern of the upper section.