We began with the task of designing an outdoor classroom for the Earth School, which involved reprogramming an existing pavilion to be better integrated with the school’s learning-walks into the Pasir Ris mangroves.

Beyond the functional reprogramming and repurposing of the pavilion into the mangrove classroom, we embarked as well on a design that tries to engage children with/in an (architectural) imagination of the environment. Indoors, the intertidal mangrove is evoked as shape-shifting landscape: a playful margins, in-between interior and exterior worlds; urban and natural selves; and states of curiosity and knowing.

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“In the ‘gap’ between high tide and low tide amidst frayed plastic rope, upended chairs sunk in mud, single boots, there can be riddles, chances, errors, twilight, the mobile mouths and valves of shellfish gaping and then shuttering tight.”

…It’s neither quite land , nor quite sea, can be a place of in or out-tide, of seals grounded or swimming, of stalking birds that can wade or fly or float. A place for shellfish that are half-fish, half-flesh; half-stone, half-living-thing.” [1]

With the tide-changing mangroves, we recall how these places are described by artist Linda Cracknell and cultural geographer Owain Jones as the “liminal margins” where imagination dwells, and magic and absurdities can happen—indeed, these are places of playfulness, where children remain children, and adults revert to their curious selves in a landscape that never stays still.

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The Earth School’s Outdoor Classroom is the design of an imaginative landscape for play, drawing from the tidal mangrove’s shapeshifting natures that never remains still and constant: in places where imagination dwells; and in  playful landscapes where children remain children.   

Beyond designing for the functional requirements of outdoor learning, the classroom is a space for knowledge collection and creative synthesis. A place from which the Earth Schoolers embark on their walking lessons deep into the mangrove woods; it is also the place of consolidation—a “wunderkammer” collection cabinet of human-made “landscape” inventions—provoking the children to once again reimagine the mangrove outdoors as they return indoors.

Indoors, the school’s architectural components of forum and seats, floors, walls and doors, projection screens and library shelves, metaphorically recounts a cross-sectional movement going from land to sea: hilly topography, wooded clearing, mangrove margins, intertidal coast, horizontal sea.

[1] Linda Cracknell and Owain Jones, “A Conversational Essay on Tides by Linda Cracknell and Owain Jones,” Tidal Cultures, June 7, 2014, https://tidalcultures.wordpress.com/a-conversational-essay-on-tides-by-linda-cracknell-and-owain-jones/.