A museum all for children will be born in Bologna. Here's what it will look like

Bologna will have a museum entirely dedicated to children: it will be the Museum of Children and Girls and will be built at Pilastro, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of the city. It will be, explains the Municipality of Bologna, which is promoting the creation of the museum, “a playful factory of experience and knowledge where young visitors can learn by doing, experimenting, manipulating and playing.”

To create the museum, an international competition was launched in December, and the winning design was selected at the end of January. The competition, sponsored by the City Council and the Bologna Order of Architects, put the technical and economic feasibility design of the intervention up for grabs and received thirteen proposals.

It is a project worth more than 3.6 million euros drawn from resources of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR): this is the amount to build the new cultural center, which, the municipality points out, will be of national importance, and will be dedicated to education, knowledge and recreation, aimed at children from 0 to 12 years old, schools and families.

Winning the competition was the temporary grouping of companies led by Aut Aut Architettura, a young firm founded in 2016 and based in Rome, which has already been awarded “Young Talent in Architecture” in 2020 by the National Council of Architects. The proposal was evaluated positively by the competition committee because, the minutes state, it “comprehensively and intelligently addresses the proposed theme. The urban insertion and the relationship with the context are appreciated, as is the detailed plan solution, which returns an interesting spatiality available for adaptation according to the educational proposals that will be developed. The project is therefore also awarded in relation to its overall development, which is particularly convincing in terms of feasibility.” Projects from 2ndto 5th place, on the other hand, will receive a prize of 5 thousand euros each.

The museum will be a place to play, experiment, study, learn and understand. A “mental gymnasium,” according to the Municipality of Bologna, where children will find ideal conditions to learn through discovery, where the playful dimension is enhanced and it is possible to learn to observe things and situations from multiple points of view. The museum will be located within the Mauro Mitilini, Andrea Moneta, Otello Stefanini park, in close proximity and direct relation to the Spina Library and the Yellow House, which already represent an important point of youth aggregation in the neighborhood, and near the future stop of the red streetcar line, soon to be built. The museum will thus be integrated architecturally, aesthetically and functionally with both the green area that houses it and the two buildings already present, thus going on to create one large hub.

The proposal of the group led by Aut Aut Architecture was also judged the best in relation to the specifications explicitly requested by the competition: reduced land consumption ( the goal is to construct the building without changing the existing permeable surface area in quantitative terms), accessibility ( the ’building will have to meet the highest international standards on accessibility and the principles of theUniversal Design, with a focus on both physical/architectural and cognitive/relational aspects), energy performance (the building’’s energy requirements will have to be better than what is required for near-zero buildings, both in winter and summer, according to the European parameters NZEB, Nearly Zero Energy Building).

The work of developing the project will continue over the next two months, during which the winning firm will deepen the architectural proposal, also confronting the emerging Scientific Committee for the new Museum, which will be appointed ad hoc by the City will have the task, in the coming years, to accompany the process of defining the educational and museum concept and its declination within the new building.

In the coming weeks the winning project and all other proposals received will be presented in detail to the city in a public initiative and exhibition. The initiative will be curated by the Foundation for Urban Innovation, as part of the process of informing, listening to and involving citizens, which has already begun in recent months and will accompany the development and realization of this important and strategic new place of culture and education dedicated to the children of Bologna and beyond.

Rendering of the future Children’s Museum of

Rendering of the future Children’s Museum of

Rendering of the future Children’s Museum of

Rendering of the future Children’s Museum of

A museum all for children will be born in Bologna. Here's what it will look like

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