Kids Return investigates how architecture continues to act after its original social function has disappeared. The project focuses on places that survive physically but have become fragmented in collective memory: buildings emptied by migration, demographic change, redevelopment, or institutional closure. Rather than documenting them as isolated ruins, the project asks how architecture stores relationships, routines, voices, absences, and unresolved histories.
The research combines spatial observation, photography, moving image, field recording, oral testimony, archival fragments, architectural representation, and AI-assisted media analysis. These materials are not used to produce a seamless historical reconstruction. Instead, they are organized as a layered narrative environment in which uncertainty and contradiction remain visible. Sound may reconnect a vacant room with remembered activity; moving images may place present-day material conditions beside personal recollection; interactive elements may allow participants to contribute or rearrange fragments without reducing them to a single authoritative account.
The proposed development phase will produce three connected outputs. First, a research archive will organize field materials, interviews, spatial records, and methodological notes. Second, a short moving-image and spatial-audio work will establish the project’s narrative and visual language. Third, a prototype participatory installation will test how audiences navigate memory through sound, projection, objects, and spatial movement. Documentation and a written essay will articulate the project’s contribution to discussions of architecture, memory, adaptive interpretation, and public history.
The project proposes that architectural preservation need not be limited to conserving physical fabric. It can also involve designing forms through which the social and emotional life of a place remains available for interpretation. By joining architectural inquiry with film, sound and installation, Kids Return seeks a public form for histories that are dispersed across buildings, bodies, media, and generations.
developed from my thesis kidsreturnproject.org/
Advisor: Elena Manferdini
Kids Return. It is a proposal, a concept, an architecture, an exhibition, a story, a definition, a resistance, a memory, a reimagination, an evoker, an approach, the music. Project Kids Return reimagines abandoned rural schools as spaces of the memory and emotional reconstruction. It renders memory through fragmented space, and inspired from Pink Floyd and the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, where children vanish to an unseen destination.
Here, Escape can also be a return. The architecture itself takes on the role of the Piper—provoking, luring, and awakening. The story reveals a state of liminality as children become adults and it shows the dilemmas the piper is facing. The piper could be an evoker and have this capability to raise the awareness of the children or the rats but he is weak in the Adult World without power, resources and other companions. The Architecture could be an approach that embraces conflict, memory, and playfulness to provoke awakening and resist control. It challenges the viewer to see architecture not as a passive structure, but as an active force of creativity, disruption, and revelation — like the piper. Or the music that lures you.
Return is not nostalgia. Not a return to childhood, but a return to curiosity, vulnerability, play, and the freedom to imagine before we learned to conform.
This track is developed from my thesis kidsreturnproject.org/