Home
is where the architecture is...
Start
in your own home, of course. Draw a picture of the outside
of your home with your child, each of you taking turns to add something.
When you're all done, go out together and compare what you remembered
to what's really there. Trace the outline of the building on a second
piece of paper and draw what goes on inside your home, in the rooms
behind the windows, with images of all of your family members doing
different things. Glue the facade (your first drawing) onto the second
picture so that the two images match up. Cut up through the center
of the facade and out along the roof and the foundation so that the
facade opens up to reveal the life and action inside.
Show
your child how the plumbing and heating systems in your
home work. Children are fascinated to see how the hot air from a furnace
is sent to all of the rooms through ducts or radiators, and to learn
where the water comes in from huge pipes under the ground outside.
By explaining these systems, you connect your home with the world
outside, which brings fuel in and takes waste out. You might start
by making your child aware of some of the noises that these systems
make -- when water runs through the pipes or the furnace goes on and
off -- and saying that these noises are evidence of the ways that
your home is taking care of your family.
Architecture
in literature
When
you read stories to your child, pay attention to the descriptions
of the buildings and rooms in the stories, which set the time and
mood and tell much about the characters and their plights. Story characters
get locked in towers and dungeons, scale enormous walls, hide on balconies,
and find respite in warm, hospitable kitchens. Writers lavish attention
on their descriptions of the city of Oz, a Maya pyramid, or an African
marketplace, often introducing many new words to your child's vocabulary,
and illustrators take pains to capture these descriptions in their
pictures.
Take
an extra moment or two together with these written images,
and wander around a bit in the pictures to see if they fit together.
If your son has a different idea about how the witch's house should
look, encourage him to make his own illustrations. By focusing on
the architectural descriptions in stories and books, you not only
foster a familiarity with the buildings of other places and times,
but also give your child valuable experience in reading comprehension.
Building
Enterprises
Provide
materials and space for your child's building enterprises, especially
for small model-making. You
can recycle innumerable items from your kitchen: corks, berry containers,
egg cartons, straws, covered wire twist-ties, cereal boxes, cardboard
tubes, and plastic containers become walls, columns, beams and domes.
Scraps of fabric, paper clips, and pipe cleaners can all be pressed
into service.
Show
your young builder how to use bobby pins or small pieces of tape to
clamp pieces together while the glue dries. These efforts
at small-scale building offer an array of experiments with the physical
properties of different materials, and allow a child to experience
the principles of balance, strength, rigidity, flexibility, stability,
and the distribution of weight. You can teach him how to name these
properties, and encourage him to begin to predict what might happen
if he tries to support a heavy piece of wood with one paper straw.
Suggest
that your child design a zoo, constructing a unique enclosure for
each animal who lives there. Very basic research -- you
can get all the information you need from an encyclopedia -- will
show that each animal needs a special place to live, with specific
requirements about temperature, access to water, open space and diet.
They also need to be protected from the people who come to see them!
On
the streets where you live
Talk
with your child about the buildings around you. When you're
waiting for a bus or going shopping together, you're almost always
surrounded by or going in and out of buildings. There are so many
different kinds used for so many different purposes! How can you tell
that this is a post office and that's a fire station, without reading
the signs? Why are their doors different? Why doesn't a factory have
windows? What are different buildings made of? Which ones are old
and which are new? How can you tell? How do different buildings make
you feel? What do you think they look like inside? Although the names
of architectural styles are interesting, you don't need to know them
to "read" buildings with your child.
Show
your child how to make rubbings by placing a piece of paper on a textured
surface and rubbing it with the side of a crayon until
the texture appears. This is a great way to make a collection of the
surfaces and patterns of bricks, vent covers, and many other building
materials that make up the built environment. Your child can make
a book to hold these images or cut them out and apply them to building
projects.
Talk
to your child about the many kinds of workers it takes to make a building.
Architects and engineers work with contractors who oversee masons,
carpenters, roofers, electricians, and plumbers, all people with specialized
knowledge who need to coordinate their efforts. They all need to know
how to measure very carefully and must be able to explain things to
each other not only in words but through drawings.
When
you travel, the architecture will change from one region to another.
Talk about this with your child. What's different here? Not only the
styles but the shapes, the ornament, and the materials of the buildings.
These changes are expressions of shifts in culture and climate. The
roofs may be flat because there's not much rainfall, or very steep
because there's more snow. Local stone will change the color, texture
and pattern of walls. Houses will often be connected in areas of dense
population and spread apart in more rural areas. Make a journal for
your child to record family trips by drawing some of the interesting
buildings or structures that you visit. Do this yourself! Architectural
monuments such as the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower are
part of the reason for taking the trip in the first place, and there's
no better way to hold a memory than by drawing what you've gone to
see. You can use the same journal and keep your drawings side by side
with your child's!
The
drawing board
When
your young architect is a bit older -- from about the third grade
-- you can show her how to draw floor plans. Examples abound
in the real-estate section in your newspaper; it doesn't take professional
training to understand or draw them. Give your child graph paper to
help keep the lines straight. Once she's more comfortable with math,
you can explain that each square on the paper represents one foot
in real life, but don't worry about that for a while. You might simply
remark on the relative sizes of the rooms. Explain the graphic symbols
used for doorways and windows in floor plans if your child is curious
about them, and decipher the abbreviations.
Encourage
her to draw in the furniture, appliances, and even the people
using the building, but be aware that children do not readily draw
"in plan," that is, from the top looking down, which is the orientation
of this kind of drawing. You can explain this convention as a bird's
eye view and put objects on the floor so that she can see how different
they look when she stands straight over them, but don't expect her
to adopt this method right away. She'll still draw most of the room's
contents from the side or mix the two viewpoints. Eventually, she'll
be able to compute perimiter and square footage using floor plans.
Ask
your child to draw a map from memory of his route from home to school.
Prompt him to think of the sequence of streets he crosses, the twists
and turns he takes, and any special landmarks along the way. Then
have him embellish or revise the map as he walks the route. This is
a great lesson in observation and a wonderful communication skill.
These
activities suggest the scope of the study of architecture. It's a
combination of math, physics, geology, geography, chemistry, history,
life science, social studies and aesthetics. It combines verbal, symbolic
and graphic thinking. Many children, in fact, have strengths in the
kind of visual, spatial and tactile thinking that are invoked in architectural
design and analysis that they may not be called upon to use in other
school subjects. The abilities to think in three dimensions, to visualize
images described in words, to figure out how to construct something
efficiently, to read symbols and graphic conventions, or to think
in terms of relationships and connections, are all skills that can
be applied to other subjects and life experiences.
--
by Marcy Abhau and Pam Carunchio
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