Playhouse for young artists created at
San Antonio exhibit by former student

Children are encouraged to draw on the walls of a playhouse designed for an interactive exhibit of children's play places in San Antonio by Laura Smith Kaarlsen, a former student at Texas A&M's College of Architecture.

Kaarlsen's design, "En Plein Air," was one of eight selected for the "Playhouses and Forts" exhibit, which runs through Oct. 24 at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

"It's a playhouse for artists, a place where kids can express themselves artistically without worrying about things getting dirty or spilling stuff," said Kaarlsen, who earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree at Texas A&M in 1990.

The playhouse's title, a French term that means "in the open air," is often used to describe the act of painting outdoors, a hallmark of Impressionism, a 19th century art movement which influenced Kaarlsen's design.

"I painted the exterior walls with different Impressionist artists in mind, like Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, O'Keefe; different artists that had leafy things, or flowery things, that painted outdoors," she said.

Kids can enter the playhouse and unleash their creativity.

Half of the playhouse's walls are made of canvas, so kids can draw on them using chalkboard paint that's inside the structure, said Kaarlsen. The canvas is hung as a sort of vertical conveyor belt, so young artists can have a fresh surface to paint on.

The interior is splashed with color and light from clear plastic with glass tubing that covers half the playhouse's roof.

"Capture your imagination and set it free," is a quote she coined for the structure, one of several times the word "imagination" appears in sayings in the structure's interior. "It's a place where art is completely surrounding you," she said.

Her husband, Shawn Kaarlsen, who also earned a BED in 1990, took the finished design to his architecture firm, Shawn Kaarlsen and Associates, Inc.

"They put the plans in a computer-aided design program, made 3-D virtual models for me and turned it all in to the botanical gardens for consideration," she said; her design was one of the eight chosen for the exhibit from 33 submissions.

Kaarlsen, an elementary school art teacher, found that her education has benefited her career.

"Teaching art and designing are both creative," she said. "In art you have to be a designer, you're always creating and designing things. I like things that don't have boundaries, that are more open-ended and have some sort of problem to solve, or a challenge."

There's different ways to teach color, or an artist's work, she said.

"There's always a way to change it up," she said. "It's never the same, and that's true of architecture too."

The exhibit, which opened June 26, is presented by the San Antonio Botanical Society in partnership with the American Institute of Architects' San Antonio chapter and the city's parks and recreation department.

The botanical gardens' home page includes a link to a PDF file about the exhibit, which includes descriptions and photos of the other structures that range from a playhouse inspired by a waterwheel to a contemporary take on the Swiss Family Robinson.

Shawn Kaarlsen and Associates' website is located at www.skaarch.com

- Posted: July 8, 2010 -