Exhibition of Mushroom Palaces and Bag Towers – Building for Tomorrow in Karlsruhe

Learn through play what recycling means

The fair is lively and noisy and contains different stations on the theme of Building for Tomorrow. It engages children and allows them to separate and sort different materials. Gloves are ready and a small wheelbarrow is ready.

Children aged 5 to 6 years in a daycare center learn in a playful way what recycling means and how new raw materials can be created. Another station with a large glass panel: behind it are building rubble. He wants to be looked at closely while searching for treasure under the building's ruins, like in a hidden object picture.

Children must “understand” the exhibition

The Mushroom Palaces and Bag Towers exhibition is about building for tomorrow, a topic that will concern today's generation of children even more in the future.

This should be passed on to young visitors by becoming active themselves. “Hands-on,” is how Tamara Engert, the curator of the exhibition, describes it: understanding in the literal sense, with all the senses, feeling, looking, smelling.

The exhibition conveys the experience of a construction site

Tamara Inger explains that real scaffolding forms the framework for the various stations in the exhibition; They are designed to convey the construction site experience in this way. There are also flashlights, magnifying glasses, and scales to closely examine, compare, and examine materials. With the help of art teacher Ina Ertelt, young visitors become explorers and researchers.

Children from KITA Himmelspforte in Karlsruhe learn in a playful way that crushed bricks can be shaped into new building materials, that textile scraps can be used as insulating materials when building houses, and that yogurt cups can undergo unexpected transformations, like shiny plastic or kitchen facades.

There is a miko tree made of mushroom cells on the top floor

Things get artistic on the top floor of the Junge Kunsthalle, where kids can design their dream house on paper using printing technology. Another room in the exhibit invites you to build your own using boxes, bamboo sticks and pieces of wood.

The miko tree is also on display there: a tree structure about two meters tall made of futuristic mushroom cell material, which can support the heavy arches that give the exhibition its name.