Forget dusty cabinets and do-not-touch signs. Ireland's first children's museum has been designed in collaboration with the people who'll be visiting it, writes Catherine Cleary.
It is almost August, and chances are that some beach towels still have last year's sand on them. For most of July many families simply gave up on the great outdoors. It has been too volatile, with deluge one minute and scorching sun on steaming rain jackets the next.
In early August one of the most unusual buildings in the glass-and-steel world of the Beacon South Quarter in Sandyford, south Dublin, opens its doors and grateful parents may well fall to their knees and kiss the floor.
This is Imaginosity, the State's first children's museum, which promises to be a place where children can play when the rain is biblical, or even when it's not. It does not involve endless rows of toddler-level sweets or branded toys. Welcome to the great indoors.
Orla Kennedy, its executive director, gave a preview as the builders were putting the finishing touches to the €11 million project. She never thought she would be putting the search term "stuffed badger" into eBay, but it was one of her more surreal tasks over the past few months as two and a half years of planning came together.
She secured the badger in the eBay auction, and he is now installed on the roof of the building, in a purpose-built badger's set, where he will "snooze" in a cosy bed as children come to visit him.
The Eco Badger's paw prints around the building tell the story of the green technology behind the museum. A cartoon depiction of the badger as a vaguely stern but grandfatherly figure is one of a number of characters created by the illustrator and children's book author Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick.
The badger and three other characters, Madge, Osity and Splodge, will lead visitors through the building, with its child-sized supermarket, post office, construction site, doctor's office and even a newsreader's desk, where budding Brian Dobsons can practise their Autocue technique.
The museum is designed for children from babyhood to the ages of 10 or older, Kennedy explains.
The centrepiece is an enclosed climbing tower that children can scramble through, starting with a submarine at the bottom, going through a ship, a wizard's lair, Rapunzel's castle and a rocket on the ascent, and finishing with a tree house.
Kennedy has visited many children's museums around the world and counts Boston Children's Museum and the 108-year-old Brooklyn Children's Museum among her favourites. The design of Imaginosity has involved asking local children what matters to them.
"Much of what is here is using their ideas, things like the doctor's office and games that they played and how important their families were to them," she says.
A play bank teaches them about money, with safe-cracking tasks of varying degrees of difficulty for would-be bank robbers. In the toddler zone, Velcro apples can be plucked from trees, and carrots and cabbages can be planted in a play floor.
"Every child will come to an interactive environment and play very differently," she says. The supermarket, with conveyor belts and vintage cash register, will allow role-playing and education about nutrition. An old-fashioned scales for weighing is there for the grandparent appeal. "Some kids will race around everything for half an hour and then go back and spend some time on the thing that appeals the most."
In the doctor's office a machine will displace your body's weight in water, and a booming bass drum will play your heartbeat back to you when you place your palm on a brass plate in front of it.
After that you can put a toy car through its NCT and climb in and out of a Smart car that was craned into the building during construction. A wall of doll's house toys allows would-be interior designers to practise their feng shui.
Upstairs there are an art studio, for which an artist's residence programme is planned, and a theatre that can hold 100 children sitting on beanbags. Behind that is the newsreader's desk, where children can put on a jacket to be filmed reading the news.
On the roof, the Eco Badger lives alongside a rooftop playground with a spectacular view of the crane-filled skyline of Sandyford stretching down to Dublin Bay. The spongy flooring has been made from recycled tyres.
"We're going to put pictures of him on his holidays on the wall, a bit like the film Amelie," Kennedy explains as we crouch in the badger's curved lair. "He'll be in front of the Eiffel Tower, on London Bridge, at Lough Dan, places like that."
These images of his travels will be computer generated, of course, although if there is anyone who would check in with a stuffed badger as carry-on baggage, it is probably Kennedy. All in a day's work, really.
She is excited about seeing children's reaction to the building and everything inside it. "After all, how many buildings are designed just for children?" she asks. Hospitals and schools are, to a degree, but typically those buildings are based around the needs of the adults who work in them rather than those of their young occupants.
She hopes that Imaginosity will be a place of magic, mischief and music for children, both school groups and families who will visit.
"I will always remember meeting a 75-year-old man who used to go to Brooklyn Children's Museum as a child," she says. "Every day after school he used to visit the museum and sit and look through a microscope and draw what he saw. I hope this is a place that children will see as somewhere where you are the best, whether it's the best builder or whatever. Children's museums are the fastest-growing museum types in the world."
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DESIGNING DREAMLAND
The chance to design Imaginosity was "a fantastic opportunity to think as a child again", says Hamish Keam. The young Australian architect, working with the Traynor O'Toole practice, delayed his trip home to stay and work on the project with his South African colleague, Brent Mostert. "You had a guy almost in his 30s and Brent, who's 30, trying to imagine how a child would enjoy it and be interested in the structure," he says.
The architects remembered back to their boyhood Lego constructions and then returned to the computer to marry the flight of imagination with the realities of what could be done. The result is a building standing on stilts over water, clad in autumn-coloured resin timber panels that will breathe with the building and expand and contract with the moisture in the air. Its glazed front curves in a wave that lets in light and marks it out from the apartment blocks that surround it - giving the impression of a child's toy sitting in the middle of a boardroom.
"We were going for a kind of Roald Dahl, dark look, in that it's a bit creepy in a way that children love, with lots of dark angles. It's not the normal, everyday happy look that many people go for when they design for children. It has been immensely enjoyable."
The €6 million, 1,500sq m (16,000sq ft) building has been given to the charity set up to run Imaginosity by the Beacon developer Landmark Developments, run by hotelier brothers Tony and Pat Fitzpatrick and former restaurant entrepreneur Paddy Shovlin. A further €5 million will be raised by Imaginosity to equip and run the facility.
The building comes with impressive green credentials - a variety of renewable energy sources are used and displayed for children to learn about when they visit. Paul Tighe, director of Ethos Engineering, designed the system that ventilates and heats the building, using wind and solar energy and super-thick insulation.
They started by insulating the fabric of the building during the construction to nearly four times the building-regulation standard. Then they turned to the ventilation and mapped the airflow to design windows that opened to the fresh air and wind-catchers on the roof to push it into areas that did not benefit from the natural breezes. On the rare hot summer day when the wind is absent, a rooftop fan will pull air down through the building.
A small combined heat-and-power plant, effectively a gas-fired engine, will generate electricity and heat. Solar panels will provide water heating, and two air heat pumps will help heat the building. "It will be interesting to monitor the building and see how low-energy it can be," Tighe says. Given its insulation values and the number of small bodies that will be hurtling around in it creating heat, the energy bills are expected to be extremely low.