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Can Toddlers Enjoy Starkly Modern Architecture?

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A house by the Viennese studio Franz Architekten is sophisticated and brutally simple.

A broad and periodically glassed-in corridor through the center links three buildings.

This glassed-in passageway extrudes past the end creates this memorable and sunny space.

The floor plan has great beauty and clarity.

After parking the car, or entering from the street, you’d walk along the glass passageway past the workshop to the kitchen, living and dining areas, to the bedrooms of the last space.

This is an extremely clear design.

Open and closed sequences along the walkway allow a series of walking views into the half-open courtyards and each container.

And the house would feel tremendously comforting.

Not only is it wrapped around the joy of swimming, but all the rooms have underfloor heating, using a geothermical heating collector and two heat pumps.

As a toddler, some of my own warmest memories were of houses – but these were colonial gable-roofed wooden houses – more like a child’s typical drawing of “home.”

For babies and toddlers like these, is the joy of design restricted to the traditional house shapes?

Or will they have equally warm memories of clearly planned modern architecture, as stark as this?