Project by Levan Kiladze @levikokiladze
A School in the Attic is a school for children and their parents under one roof with six peaks. The ground floor is an indoor cloister facing a courtyard: coworking, cooking, a bookstore, reading. A child can steal a book and bring it up to the attic, or watch people come and go through the windows in the floor. Ladders climb between floors. Parents have lunch with their children. Children watch their parents work, and parents watch their children learn. The site is 5th Street Park in Manhattan’s East Village, where an H-shaped school once stood, and women later attempted an unrealized feminist school. NYC’s cooperative preschools already place parents in the classroom. But what happens when parents simply have their own day there? The massing reads as two figures: a forest at street level, mountains above. Inside is the attic, where children watch the city.
