Anyone who has already learned to read, and these are large parts of the target group of this newspaper, will probably not yearn too much to go back to kindergarten or even a crèche. In summary, both are commonly referred to as “daycare centers” – a word that some Bavarian mayors still do not easily come across, if only for reasons of dialect. Then they keep talking about kindergarten, and somehow that alone wouldn’t be provincial at all. After all, the facility is called “kindergarten” and not “kindergarten” even in English. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, once the governor of California, has never done an action comedy called Daycare Cop either.
In any case, the day-care centers in Bavaria are making a big splash this weekend, and quite a few adults might even want to visit them. At the “Architektouren”, a decentralized major PR event organized by the Chamber of Architects, 218 new projects and buildings are open to all architect tourists – and at least 27 of them are kindergartens, day-care centers, children’s homes and children’s homes.
This may also be due to the fact that the architects, who are allowed to submit their viewing objects themselves, are particularly proud of such buildings. Although practically without exception they all came up with the same idea of providing their brand new buildings with vertically arranged wooden slats or wooden slats.
As far as the respective designation is concerned, some of the kindergartens, day-care centers, day-care centers and children’s houses in the program are still called “kindergarten”, “day-care center”, “children’s house” and “house of the children”. But because the names are very similar to the wooden slats, they will probably all soon be called “Schwalbennest” like the two buildings in Dettelbach and Schnelldorf, or “Stork’s Nest” like in Wenzenbach. Or they are named after saints whose names not many children today bear: St. Michael, St. Martin or St. Stephen, for example.
“Noah’s Ark” like the new day-care center in Aurachtal already exists elsewhere. Here, however, the name forms a surprising contrast to the design: most people have probably always imagined the wooden slats of the ark to be horizontal since kindergarten.