Space Inquiry Camp,
Starting from the Library in Taiwan

On December 22, 2025, a message arrived on Instagram from an elementary school teacher in Taiwan. He had seen our activity of building domes out of newspaper: “It looks so professional, and wonderful.” The sender was Jason, a science teacher. His first idea was a science lesson—projecting a starry sky inside a dome—and it came with a candid confession: that as a teacher, he had not yet managed to draw children into the heart of architecture.

From there, we wrote almost every day. But in January 2026, the plan stumbled once. The idea of “building a star-dome,” with a finished object decided in advance, was questioned by the funding body: if the outcome is fixed from the start, the value of inquiry disappears. So the two of us rebuilt the plan from the ground up—into an open inquiry with no predetermined finished form. The principle that would later run through the whole three days—“one goal, one constraint; leave the rest to the children”—may well have grown out of this very lesson, which we, the teachers, had to learn first.

The three days began with a picture book—but first, name tags. We wrote each child's Chinese name alongside its katakana, and I made a name tag of my own too. Not as the one who teaches, but as one of the makers.

I read the picture book This Is Home in Japanese, and two children who had visited Japan in April read it back, taking turns, in Chinese. A moment when the children became the interpreters. When we finished—“Does the white dragon in the town really have nine tails?” “Where's the little fairy?”—everyone shared what they'd found by pointing.

After the book, each child drew “a home just for me” as a cross-section. A house with a slide, a house that moves, a house with a field on the roof. “Spilling outside the frame is a very good thing,” I told them.

In the afternoon, we moved to the school library. Counting the shelves and chairs, the children drew floor plans. To a child who had left out the chairs: “There are eight of these chairs, but you haven't drawn them—count again,” a check made right there.

And then, before any tools, we measured with the body. The length of a finger, an arm, a height, the distance to a joint—each child measured and recorded their own. One child traced their hand and wrote in the measurement of every knuckle. Numbers are a common language—neither Japanese nor Chinese. From here, the “dialogue” between me and the children began to move in dimensions and ratios.

The last hour was for reading, freely. “To make a library, you first have to enjoy books.” Everyone chose their top three favorites and introduced them, holding up the covers.

Day two: inside real architecture. The conversation about buildings had already begun on the bus. When I said “that bridge is interesting,” one child answered, “What Taiwan cares about most isn't function—it's being beautiful,” offering an architectural view of their own.

On campus, Jason handed the children a map and let them find the way themselves, “even if you get it wrong.” At Toyo Ito's library for the College of Social Sciences, we began by observing—“What does it look like?”—and the children searched out where the architect's intention, “to read a book as if in a forest,” appeared. They measured the height of a handrail (in Japan there's a rule: at least 110 cm) and the spacing of the lattice (11 cm), and we shared words like “stepping stones” and “waffle slab” on the spot. One child reasoned out a dimension they couldn't reach: “If I can't measure it here, I can't over there either—because the ratio is symmetrical.”

One child described the measuring under the blazing sun, back at home: “I had a mission, so I got absorbed and forgot the heat” (from the guardian survey).

Back at school, the task was to draw the interior from memory. And here, something unexpected happened: many of the children started searching for images on their tablets. “They aren't used to drawing from memory, from imagination, from thought”—that realization led straight to the next day's decision.

On the morning of day three, I declared that tablets would not be used, and said why: “I don't want to pull ideas out of the internet—I want to pull them out of the imagination.” Then, to floor plans. When I drew a plan freehand, the children gathered around on their own to watch. Windows, doors, walls, all drawn freely, unbound from squares. “Who uses it” was free too—a library for animals, for squirrels, was fine.

One goal: “build our own school library.” One constraint: “you must use a tape core.” Because the core is a circle, no model came out a square box.

From plan to solid—and here, a wall of structure appeared. A child who had barely spoken on the first day came to call me over when their dome roof began to sag. “The roof is collapsing.” I gave the technical support of reinforcing it, but showed several ways and left the choosing to the child: “My advice, the teacher's advice, your own idea—whichever you take, as long as the structure holds.” After that, the child began to ask questions, one after another.

A flower library. A heart-shaped library. A library inside a fountain. A library of chairs. A library for aliens. And “a library where you don't read”—a space not for reading, but for doing what you want to do. That was the work of a child who, on the first day, had drawn “a house of math and Go,” and who, on the last, redefined the very meaning of the assignment for themselves.

When I asked a child who had painted only the glass surface green, they said, “Because there's a forest beyond it.” Without anyone telling them, they had applied Toyo Ito's design idea, observed the day before, to their own work. What can't be fully told in words, the work tells. And a child who had spoken very little on the first day presented on their own that day, and layered questions and comments onto the others' presentations.

What Jason wrote in this chapter was that, in Taiwan's classrooms, teachers—worried the children won't manage—tend to prepare examples and lay out the steps in fine detail; that this raises the completion rate, but can also narrow the room for children to think and choose. Having set down that candid reflection on their own practice, he wrote this for us: that from now on, in Taiwan's classrooms, he wants to reduce over-demonstration and answers given too soon, and give students more time to observe, try, fail, revise, and choose.

And on the change over three days: “What moved us most was not that sixteen distinctive models were completed, but that we witnessed their attitude toward learning beginning to change.” Learning that truly matters, he concludes, is not what was memorized, but “whether, after the program ends, the way that child sees the world has changed.”

In later analysis, this practice showed features readable through sixteen lineages of theory, from Dewey (learning by experience) to Reggio Emilia (the image of the competent child). It also overlaps with ideas cultivated in Japan. The report's reading is this: it wasn't built by applying a particular theory—rather, eight years of trial and error had, on its own, arrived at the same conclusions as each of those theories.

And about the very condition of “words not getting through.” The practice of architecture is made of many modes—observing, pointing, measuring, drawing, building, gesturing—and each of them, just as it is, becomes a path for learning to travel. The wall of language worked not as an obstacle to overcome, but as a “just-right inconvenience” that drew out the children's own ingenuity. That, we believe, is why every guardian answered that not sharing a language was, in fact, a good experience.

Circumstantial evidence is gathering that the structural factors can work apart from me. Even before we met, Jason was independently practicing the same kind of approach—“hand them a map and let them walk it themselves.” And he transferred the thinking of the April newspaper dome, on his own, into an entirely different theme at his school (an education in kind speech). Still, a full reproduction by another teacher has not yet been tested. The report offers this not as proof, but as a hypothesis to be verified.

A follow-up study at six months and a year. Continuing the mutual visits of Taiwanese and Japanese children. Building a curriculum framework that even teachers without an architecture background can use. A project where children take part in redesigning school spaces. And to grow “children's education and development through architecture”—a field that joins architecture to pedagogy and developmental psychology—together, from Taiwan and Japan.

Jason's chapter closes like this: “In the end, architecture education is not only about architecture. It is a guide—so that children learn to observe the world, learn to understand others, and come to believe that they, too, have the power to take part in creating the living environment of the future.”