Nurturing a younger generation
Program for children in rural areas aims to get them to use daily items in creative ways, Fang Aiqing reports.
"When I was at this age, I was no longer satisfied with little handworks but always dreamed of something big enough to put myself in," Li Hao, founder of One Take Architects, says about his original intention of the program.
He grew an interest in the education of "left-behind" children when he worked with projects in the countryside in 2015.
He discovered that as living conditions improved, another problem became evident. Apart from their parents' work－the majority do blue-collar jobs in cities, the children barely knew what other choices, such as more creative job opportunities, could possibly lie in their future.
Li then wanted to give rural children an example: What an architect can be good at.
This year around 30 pupils from Te'erguo township's central primary school joined the making of the "carousel" and some of them learned to ride a bicycle for the first time.
Before the architects set off from their city base, they had prepared for a month.
They managed to get 12 bicycles out of use, designed the main structure of the "carousel" and completed the whole process for testing before tearing it down again and deciding what tools the children would use. They made a manual introducing the assembling steps one by one.
