This nursery proposal treats early childhood education as an integral part of the city’s collective infrastructure of care. It asks how architecture can support emotional, social, and cognitive development – not as abstract principles, but through space itself. From the scale of an infant’s hand grasping a surface to the daily negotiations between carers, families, and neighbourhood life, the nursery works across bodies, rooms, and streets. It is a vivid, dynamic space where care becomes infrastructure and architecture becomes play – a spatial field of well-being, recreation, learning and rest, designed with and for infants, toddlers, and staff.

The design centres on a compact two-storey volume, freeing up most of the site for outdoor play and exploration. A cross-shaped core organises movement, gathering vertical and horizontal circulation and moments of spontaneous interaction between children, carers, and visitors. Learning rooms and collective spaces spill outwards, always reaching for sunlight, air, and contact with the garden. Inside and outside fold into one another, allowing learning to shift from floors to trees to earth – from crawling to climbing to reaching the city beyond the site.

The building’s envelope is made of ceramic insulating bricks, combining environmental performance in one unifying architectural gesture. This textured surface wraps both building and garden, holding colour, shadow, and movement. Interiors are designed for sensory learning: walls invite touch, materials resist or give way, scales shift to meet smaller bodies, and colours form cues for navigation and play. Here, architecture does not discipline behaviour – it responds to it, expanding what a public nursery can hold and who it can be for.