Crèche, Geneva

Compared with other European countries, Switzerland lags behind in the daily care of children. Traditionally and politically, the family organization looks to the private sector for support and the state must not replace the family. In the retrograde vision, which still dominates the collective imagination, a mother must dedicate herself fully to the education of her children. Further, since compulsory education rarely starts before the age of five, places in a crèche become highly coveted commodities for families wanting to place their child in a day nursery. This is why when both parents make the decision – sometimes painful, sometimes a relief – to leave their child in a crèche each morning, they usually expect the institution to provide their child with an environment that will foster its development. A setting that will offer the child some reference points to orientate itself in life and accompany its emancipation.

From this point of view, the Bernex crèche, designed by Genevan architects Aeby & Perneger raises some interesting questions. In effect the composition tends to disguise the customary reference points one expects to find in a building designed for very small children. There is no mimicry of a child's world, no false adult projection of a childish universe. In the Bernex crèche there is no clever colour coding to help with the identification of places, no break in scale to aid the child in its perception of space. The form of the building, its internal composition and the surface finishes all tend towards abstraction. The absence of visual reference points inside and outside the building means that children are unable to cling to familiar elements. Space seems to float in a vacuum.

The building, in a densely wooded public park, stands on a concrete base, which negates the gentle slope of the terrain. The six faces of the composition do not try to set up a dialogue with the surroundings; rather they favour its integration because of the difficulty in perceiving their scale. The fine striations on the glass facade cladding further accentuate the dematerialization of the construction. The covered courtyard and the entrance are treated as gashes in the volume, but the smooth detailing of the glass panels means they have no readily perceived scale. Inside the crèche, the functions are naturally distributed along the glass facades. The circulation area is arranged around a central space, at first sight impenetrable and covered with a translucent membrane that bathes the heart of the building with a strange, indefinable light. It is natural light, but very uniform, cancelling the shadows and smoothing all the walls. In the absence of any chromatic markers this space acts as a genuine place of transition, an indeterminate in-between space that must be negotiated before entering the rooms that will welcome the children.

The play and rest rooms are disposed along the glass facades, organized according to age group. These spaces, too, are white and smooth, forming a completely neutral background for the coloured furniture and toys.

In the centre of the building, reached through a door in the translucent membrane, is the oval psychomotricity room, which is lined with corrugated acrylic glass. A diffuse natural light enters through the glazed ceiling. There is a strange weightless feeling in this shadowless space. Sounds literally roll round the corrugated wall and remain suspended in the air. Here there are no comforting reference points. Cut off from the external world, it does not correspond to normal sensory perception. It is actually rather destabilizing and has so far been little used by the educational staff. And yet, perhaps it is in spaces such as this, of a kind rarely encountered, that a child, or group of children, could develop a personality that transcends the often overly rigid traditional setting.