Taika Kindergarten in Seinäjoki has been well received by the children and the staff alike

The Taika Kindergarten opened its doors to serve Seinäjoki families in January 2018. Like a barn from the outside, Taika is colorful and full of light, and loved by the staff and the children alike.

The Taika kindergarten is now in the middle of its first fall season. It was completed just at the end of last year and it welcomed its first pupils in the very first days of January this year. The new kindergarten has been extremely well received by the children, their families and the teachers and educators alike. After having experienced the winter with a lot of snow and the unusually warm and sunny summer in the new premises, the little pupils are now eager to see how the kindergarten with its yard adapts as the season changes yet again.

The building is carefully designed with the needs of children in mind in order to provide them an experiential and friendly space. The star-shaped plan serves to provide rhythm and to create a sense of a home like scale in a building designed to provide childcare for a relatively large number of children. Taika offers childcare for 225 children between ages of one and seven as well as a place of work for 50 staff members. Taika also serves families with parents with shift work schedules offering overnight care for a rotating group of 200 children with a maximum of 60 children spending the night in the kindergarten at a time. This means that all overnight childcare offered by the City of Seinäjoki to its residents is now gathered under one roof.

Taking its cue from the Ostrobothnian traditional barn in the open field, Taika is shaped like a large barn. Yet, it is colorful and full of light. With its flexibly adapting naptime spaces, its highly practical foyer areas equipped to deal with the challenges brought along by the Nordic weather and the high demands it poses on children’s outdoor clothing, as well as the pockets of loosely separated outdoor areas each with its own porch to provide shelter from rain and to serve children of different age groups, the Taika Kindergarten is a great example of the contemporary Nordic approach to the design of kindergarten buildings.

For more information on Taika, see the project presentation HERE.