LearningScape -An Interactive Learning Center

LearningScape –an Interactive Learning Center

Using park as a means to create an interactive learning experience, exploring learning through the built and unbuilt environments, collaboration, and play.

In the human body, learning is an ever-evolving process. We learn consciously and subconsciously; through our senses, through our surroundings and through the people we interact with. But in our society, all learning has been relegated to ‘schools’ where a strict, regimented learning takes place, and where children are expected to memorize course material rather than being exposed to a holistic learning environment. Thus, abilities like creative, cognitive, and critical thinking are usually sidelined in children, and they end up becoming adults who may have base knowledge but lack the ability to think critically and respond to situations in an original way.

An Interactive Learning Center is proposed in the educational district of H-8/4, Islamabad, that counterpoints this by creating an integrated learning environment. Envisioned as a ‘landscape of learning’, LearningScape will combine structured and unstructured methods of learning to curate an explorative learning experience, centered around learning through participation and play. Thus, an ‘interactive’ learning environment is created, where learning occurs through multiples means: through interaction with the architectural fabric, interaction with nature, through skill development, through physical training, through interaction with peers, and through unmitigated play.

Thus, the architectural fabric of the Learning Center is designed in a way to instigate interaction. It is inspired from the play equipment in Japanese Park, Islamabad, which does not offer clear rules or guidelines on how the play objects can be used. Instead, children are forced to think, improvise, and develop their own games and rules of play, subconsciously turning the act of play into a learning activity. The architecture of LearningScape adapts this principle, the built fabric itself providing opportunity for activity and play, thus rooting these actions firmly into the bounds of a learning environment.

LearningScape is proposed at the site of a formerly decrepit urban park. The building is thus spread across the site in such a way that it serves as a means through which the park is revived and reconnected into the surrounding context. Community programs are also introduced into the learning fabric, acting as magnets for the people of the neighborhood. All together, the built fabric is intertwined into a rich natural experience that enforces the identity of the site as a park, creating points of interest and intersection between the public and private domains that define the experience of both the built and unbuilt parts of the site. Within the region, LearningScape inculcates a novel and enthusiastic approach towards learning, and within the neighborhood, it becomes the means through which community life is revitalized.

Project Type: Educational and Community
Location: H-8/4 Islamabad, Pakistan
Site Area: 630 000 sqft approx.
Built Area: 70 000 sqft approx.
Capacity: 300-320 people
Operational Timings: Programs for school children = 13 00 - 19 00 on weekdays, 10 00 - 17 00 on weekends
Community Programs = 10 00 - 19 00