Activities: Introduction of the design team, introduce basic architectural vocabulary, tools, and materials. Homework: drawing a plan and or elevation of the students home.
Objective: We took turns to briefly describe who we are and what we do. I brought some of my models and architectural drawings to show the class, and they seemed really captivated.
New Vocabulary: plan, section elevation, scale
Resources: Architectural drawings
Activities: Slide presentation of architectural monuments and masterpieces; have the kids make there own mazes in order to reemphasize the concept of a plan. Maze activity
Objective: We wanted to use the slides to expose the students to some of the architectural monuments that exist across the planet and to possibly inspire their own creativeness. List of slides: a birds nest, a beaver's dam, the pyramids at Giza, The Dome of the Rock, The Temple of Athena Nike, Notre-Dame, a pagoda, the Biblioteque Nationale, Falling Water, Venturi's Ben Franklin House.
Having students create their own maze in plan view is a great creative way of introducing plan. Stone masons used labyrinths on the floors of many medieval cathedrals and in Greek mythology Zeus had the architect daedelus build a labyrinth to place his illegitimate son, the Minator, in for safe keeping.
Materials Needed: construction paper, scissors, and glue.
Resources: AIE slide library.
Activities: Have kids create store fronts on Bristol board of buildings where stores occupy the first floor and residences occupy the second floor.
Objective: Today the class was asked to name 30 different businesses that would normally exist in a neighborhood. After coming up with 30, the kids were assigned businesses, and each created on Bristol board an elevation that depicts a store on the first floor and an apartment on the second floor. Sam put together a colorful example where he made a restaurant with a front window, a simple arched door and a cut out figure of a person enjoying food in the window. Above this was an entablature with the name of the restaurant, and then above that element was a simple constructed bay window made of creased construction paper to designate the second floor living quarters. They were not necessarily to copy this example, but to use it as a guided of a form of inspiration for their own personal elevations.
Materials Needed: Bristol board, construction paper, glue scissors,
colored pencils and crayons, old magazines.
Activities: Visit the Atwater Kent Museum
Activities: Opening the kids eyes to architectural elements and details that exist within their surroundings; a handout was used so that the kids could easily follow the exercise.
Objective: Today's activity was a short walking tour of Hunting Park. The tour directed the attention of the students to architectural details that exist in the neighborhood that they many not have take the time to notice on their own. Concepts of materiality, building form, window placement, trees, and history were all touched upon in the handout provided to the students so that they could fallow along.
Resources: A handout put together with quick sketches of some
of the landmarks within the neighborhood.
Activities: Breaking the class into four groups and give each group a separate responsibility: creating green space, placing housing with in the plan, creating retail corridors and corner stores, incorporating industrial factories and recreational space.
Objective: This week was the start of the final project, which allowed the students to take all of the previous lessons and use them as building blocks that established a firm understanding of plans, business types and their neighborhood, and in doing so, prepared the class to tackle a much larger problem, to come up with their own vision of a "New Hunting Park". Issues such as social well being , safety and security, environmental concerns, economic prosperity, fun and enjoyment were supposed to guide the design to make Hunting Park a better place for everyone.
Sam procured a city planning map of the area, and it was blown up to roughly five foot by five foot. It was then divided into four quadrants and the class was divided up into four groups. Each group added green space, one added residential space, another added retail establishments and created retail corridors, and the final group added industrial sites and created recreational space. The green space was designated with green craft paper, the residential areas were marked by strips of newspaper, retail was made with colored construction paper, and the industrial and recreational spaces were designated with a sandpaper.
New Vocabulary: retail corridor, adaptive reuse
Materials Needed: City planning map, construction paper, craft
paper, sandpaper ,scissors, and glue.
Objective: This was the second week of our urban planning project, and the sections of the pan were passed onto the next group so that the four aspects, green space, retail, residential, and industrial / recreational could slowly fill the sheets.
Activities: Same as Week #6.
Objective: Once the groups were finished, we connected the four quadrants together to create the completed composition, and then we presented it to the class. A member of each group was asked to come up in front of the class and explain what they did and why they did it so that the entire class could share in the experience.
Activities: After the four section were complete, they were jointed to create a completed representation of the surrounding neighborhood, a colorful collage effect.
