Museum of Childhood (Bogotá)

Brief Information

The Museum of Childhood in Bogotá was not a display-case museum with objects behind glass, but a large educational space: in an 8,000-square-meter building, dozens of modules and hundreds of exhibits operated according to the principle of “learn by playing.” Here, children were introduced to science, technology, culture, and art through activities, workshops, school programs, and vacation courses.

In 2017, the museum was closed because major renovations were needed, and the site was later turned into a children’s park. It is therefore worth seeing it as a space where the educational function changed form: instead of museum modules, the source mentions bounce houses, bicycle rides, and racing tracks. The most interesting thread here is not the list of programs, but how learning through play quite literally moved from inside the building outdoors.

What to Notice First

The best focus for a visit is the traces of how the museum turned learning into physical objects. The building’s walls were painted for the museum’s fifteenth anniversary by young Colombian artists; this created a collection of 42 frescoes that became an urban landmark. These murals matter not as decoration, but as a visible trace of the moment when the children’s museum began speaking to the city from the outside, through facades and walls.

It makes sense to compare three types of educational “models”: the frescoes on the walls, a real Boeing 720 in the outdoor gardens, and a room with a scaled-down image of city roads. The airplane stood without fuel, electricity, or engines, but precisely because of that it worked as an educational object for the basics of aeronautics rather than as transport. The road room performed the same operation with the city: it compressed the street into an understandable layout with signs and rules of conduct. After the transformation into a park, this logic is continued by play objects and paths.