Inspiring Young Designers with Architecture4kids

Engaging children in urban design and planning activities can increase interest in these professions in later years. It also provides perspectives infrequently considered in architecture, which are fundamental to building inclusive, sustainable cities.

The municipal library might not be where you’d expect to find a group of youngsters enthusiastically engrossed in lessons on a Saturday morning, to the point of wanting to stay after the class ends.

The reason for this scene, in the world-famous library in Alexandria, Egypt (the Bibliotheca Alexandria) is that these children – groups of about 10 each time – are on an introductory workshop about architecture.

The brain behind this operation is Mai Mourad, an architectural graduate from the Cairo University Department of Architecture, where she also recently completed a PhD degree. Mai teaches in several universities in Egypt, such as Cairo University and the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport.

Mai noticed how degree students were turning up to the course with very little prior knowledge, for one very simple reason: architectural principles aren’t taught in schools.

But, if they were, how many more youngsters might grow up to be architects? How much more diverse could the urban design sector – and cities themselves – be?

With these questions in mind, “I started to think how I can make the architecture discipline applicable to children,” Mai tells us. The result was Architecture4kids.

Architecture4kids

Mai’s initiative gives children hands-on experience in design, distilling her university classes into play activities, like games, drawing, colouring, mapping, model-making, and handicrafts.

Sharing relevant knowledge through play makes architecture fun for a younger crowd, Mai says – a solid basis for sparking their imagination. The programme is also something of a masterclass in engaging young people.

Making Lessons Relatable

For each intake, Mai runs a series of workshops for 7-to-12-year-olds, hosted in public or educational settings – like schools and libraries – that children are familiar and comfortable with.

Workshop duration is limited to a couple of hours at most “because children get bored after this time”. Courses, comprising four sessions, are usually spread over two weeks or a month.

Mai considers activities according to the age of attendees, but the course structure never changes; each session is a module providing a broad grounding in the main architectural topics:

urban design
architectural design
fabrication
interior design.

Mai walks the children through the basics of form – mass and volume, size and shape – then they have a go for themselves, converting their ideas into a basic 3D model by folding paper or using sticks, foam, Lego, or Meccano.

To have these shapes, openings, solids, and voids which can be transferred to rebuilding in the real life from just their imagination is incredible.

Referencing built environments that the kids already know – like their grandmother’s apartment block, a school route, or Alexandria’s citadel and historic bridge – students get to understand architecture vocabularies, the design process, and mapping of the urban environment.

“These surroundings help children to learn about how they can design an elevation” and create an urban model from it, she explains. “We imagine how it can work in real life.”

It’s as much about the interior as the exterior, and the kids are encouraged to think about function, like “the number of floors, the shape of the building, can there be a cantilever, a bathroom, or a public space, and so on.” They even consider what construction materials would be suitable and give their designs a name.

^{Workshop about form and mass at Masra public library with a group aged 10 to 14 years old. Image credits: Architecture4kids / Mai Mourad}

Children & the City

Though this initiative, Mai’s personal objective is to motivate a greater interest in architecture, but it serves a bigger purpose.

Professionals in architecture and urban planning are starting to accept that the most liveable cities are those that cater for diverse needs, lifestyles, and perspectives.

Of the four billion people living in urban areas, 1.18 billion – roughly one third – are children. Projections estimate that 70% of kids will be urban dwellers by 2050. So designing cities with them in mind makes sense.

That can’t be done without their input.

A Child’s Experience

Children do not experience the city in the same way as adults.

As an example, Mai references the ticket offices on Cairo’s metro system. The counters are about 100-120cm high and out of reach for those of smaller stature. It’s a similar story for wash basins in public bathrooms, she adds.

These problems strongly correlate with the design status quo that the rest of us take for granted. It caters for adults, and maybe older youths like teenagers, but overlooks what Mai calls “the smallest ones” in society.

Architecture4kids does more than prepare the future generation of urban designers for their uni course; it identifies these problems in design, providing essential feedback on what children want and need to be properly included in urban environments.

“Children Need a Human City”

Changes don’t need to be “huge”, Mai says. It can be as simple as “fences in the street designed to be at their level.”

Practical elements are only half the story. Quality of life for kids is also about providing a “joyful and cheerful city” that’s often denied to them. Again, it’s not complicated: “Just simple items like colour.”

All they want is for a city to be more human.

Wide streets and high buildings cater for grownup needs like cars and office blocks but exclude elements of play, which could benefit everyone’s wellbeing.

Beating this blip in planning is not just a case of creating a park either, Mai stresses – it is about integrating safe, child-friendly spaces throughout the city.

She hopes that the information coming out of these workshops can inform better planning practices – if not among current designers and planners, then at least for the participants who become the architects of the future.

Sustainability

Speaking of the future, Architecture4kids incorporates elements of sustainability too.

“We go through what sustainability is and what areas of greenery do for heat, to reduce the temperature and climate change.”

Our CityChanger explains that Cairo is heating up, with temperatures reaching 45°C more frequently than ever before, affecting vulnerable people – including children – worst. With this warming, pollution is on the rise and air quality declining.

Working with maps – activities like colouring and placing 3D models on them – gives kids the chance to identify where to add green areas and consider other sustainable solutions. In some classes, Mai talks the kids through the advantages of building with local materials.

“Here in Egypt, we have this history of building with mud,” she says. It’s a practice that stretches back to ancient civilisations using it for pyramids and temples. These days it has a new purpose: as a natural material, mud provides a more comfortable interior ambient temperature and “reduces the climate change effect on the city”.

^{Image credits: Architecture4kids / Mai Mourad}

It’s a reminder that building better cities requires a reframe, as well as asking “smart questions” that destabilise the established problematic norm – questions like whether there’s another way to design and build a city, a different material we could choose, or a reason to change the type of a building altogether.

Demand

The popularity of Architecture4kids continues to increase, fulfilling one of Mai’s wishes: for more kids to learn about the field.

It’s an objective shared by Egypt’s Ministry of Social Solidarity. Recognising the success of the programme’s modular teaching methodology, they enlisted Mai to deliver more classes.

So, it’s picking up pace. To meet demand, Mai now has the help of 3 or 4 volunteers at any time, picked from a “very passionate” architecture community, so workshops can be delivered in different locations. She has also started offering online sessions to reach further throughout the country, although that poses new challenges.

Hybrid Help & Hindrance

It’s common for six-year-olds to engage well with the in-person programme, but that’s too young for online teaching.

“Offline is more interactive. I can help kids with the materials, help them to understand how they can do things with artworks and so on,” Mai says.

Online lessons need to be more structured to keep youngsters on track, and Mai finds it useful to split the group to focus on activities appropriate for different ages: younger cohorts (8-10) partake in simpler activities like building a 3D cube and exploring its role in architecture. For older ones (11 and 12) the fun comes from using technology.

As a result, Architecture4kids online has developed into a two-tier programme: foundation level and AI level.

Through the ‘Artificial intelligence in Architecture’ sessions, “children learn how to use tech such as AI to express their architectural imagination”. In one activity, they use it to convert sketches into near-lifelike forms.

^{Two children’s drawings from an Architecture4kids online session about their imagined villa, which was then converted by AI into a realistic architecture design. Image credit: Architecture4kids / Mai Mourad}

Reflections on Success

The insights in building a playful and inclusive city that Mai has picked up from children in her sessions have already influenced her own designs – and what our CityChanger teaches her students at Cairo University.

Mai is proud of Architecture4kids’ achievements so far, and rightly so.

The initiative was recognised by the Union International of Architects’ Golden Cube Awards for its work, which has become so popular that the Egyptian Initiative for Teaching Architecture to Children funded a series of summer courses for more than 50 kids per week!

This especially was a chance to reach young people from less advantaged backgrounds, the ones that live in what Mai calls “condensed urban tissues” that lack convivial and natural spaces – among those with most to gain from changes to urban design.

Success But Stable

For now, Architecture4kids remains an independent community initiative, although the potential is clear. In 2024, it beat off more than 170 entries to win the educational category of the Woman’s Economic Empowerment Programme. Moving forward, Mai also has dreams of launching Architecture4kids as a business.

And Mai was invited to take Architecture4kids to participate in the International Children World Urban Forum, a part of the World Urban Forum (WUF12) held in Cairo, organised by UN-Habitat.

Still, when she speaks about the workshops, it’s not of international recognition or success, but how well the children pick up the new concepts and embrace architecture and design with some passion.

Which explains why, come closing time at the Bibliotheca Alexandria, Mai has to usher the children to leave – a reflection of the “very joyful experience” she’s creating. Through this, Mai is proving how easy and effective it can be to create a culture of change.

“The imagination of the kids is very, very, very wide. Just give them the tools and let them play. They will produce what you need.”

Architecture4kids: Urban Design Skills in Early Years Teaches Valuable Lessons in Sustainability