Objective:Students begin to develop a sense of the built environment that makes up a community and receive an introduction to the need for planning.
Activity:
- Students form groups of two and each team receives a 12" x 12" cardboard base. With materials students have collected, the team builds a model of a building in the neighborhood. After fifty minutes the teams arrange their models together as a neighborhood and discuss what is neglected or missing from their town.
Materials:
- found recycled materials
- scissors, glue, tape
Comments:
The team used this
initial session to set the tone for sessions that would give students more
in-depth information for the final project. The activity stimulated an
impromptu building of a neighborhood, giving the teaching team insight
into students' understanding of what makes up a neighborhood and students'
craft and model building skills.
Objective:Introduce the class to elementary principles of design through visualization, hands-on activities, and vocabulary.
Activity:
- Slide presentation: The students receive shapes cut from black construction paper and hold up the shapes that they see in the buildings that are on the slides.
- Additive shapes: The students arrange the shapes of black construction paper to create 2-dimensional streetscapes.
- Geometric shapes: Students use clay to form 3-dimensional shapes.
- Color: Discuss color to introduce the concept of warm and cool colors and how they affect us.
- Scale vs. Size: After discussing the differences of size and scale, the students receive a figure made from pipe cleaners and draw a building appropriate for the figure.
- Scale exercise.
Vocabulary:
- streetscape
- landscape
- scale
- 2-dimensional
- 3-dimensional
- warm and cool colors
- arc
- semi-circle
Materials:
- black construction paper
- clay
- figure made from pipe cleaners
- slide projector & random slides of buildings
- handout on color
Comments:
Shape, color, size and scale were the topics
covered in this class session. We began with a slide show of
architectural elements and building types. Students connected actual
forms with their abstract counterparts by holding up cut-out shapes when
they recognized the shapes on slides. They then used the shapes to create
streetscapes on their desktops. After covering shapes in 2-dimensional
form, we transformed those shapes into 3-dimensional form with clay.
Discussion of warm and cool colors followed. The example of McDonald's packaging demonstrated the concept of color temperature. Colors relate to the foods they hold, such as a brown container for hash browns, and also affect perceptions of food characteristics. Red makes something seem hotter and stripes in the fries container make them appear to have greater volume.
The students received a handout of two interiors. They colored the top portion using only warm colors and the bottom using only cool colors. The difficulty arose when students associated a color's temperature with an object that was of that color. For example, one boy felt that black is warm because it is like smoke.
The majority of students came to understand the difference of size and scale by drawing a building for the pipe cleaner person.
Objective:Follow up on elementary principles of design and begin to look at those elements that make up a neighborhood.
Activity:
- Texture: Place several objects of differing characteristics in a grab bag. Groups of four to five students compete to find the two objects of contrasting textures, such as flexible and stiff, listed on the blackboard.
- Slide show: "Streetscapes" introduces the walking tour.
- Walking Tour: Using a checklist, the students identify elements that make up a neighborhood and on the back of their checklist they make texture rubbings of various surfaces.
Vocabulary:
- flexible
- awning
- gutter
- down spout
- twin house
- row house
Materials:
- found items for grab bag (cotton ball, clay, spring, sand paper, marble, etc)
- slide projector and streetscape slides
- neighborhood walk checklist
Comments:
The session began with a game of textural
adjectives: surface qualities and surface temperature. The "grab bag"
also reinforced the previous week's lesson of design basics. The students
formed groups in which each student had a specific amount of time to find
the two materials that applied to terms listed on the blackboard, such as
smooth and rough or cold and warm. The competition between the teams
added to their enthusiasm to find the correct items.
The "Streetscape" slide show with audio was a fun introduction to the neighborhood walk. It talked about building shapes, patterns, materials, scale, and street furniture, giving the students insight into what they should be looking for as they walked around the local neighborhood of South Philadelphia. The enthusiastic atmosphere of the classroom carried over into the street as students looked for items on their checklist. They yelled with pride each time they sighted an item and the task soon became a group effort to find everything.
Objective:Finish the topic of basic design principles with the subject of pattern and introduce the larger issues of the built environment by discussing site conditions.
Activity:
- Circulation map: The students mark on a map the route a person would take to get from one point to another on foot and in a car. They mark both the vehicular and pedestrian paths in different colors to show the difference between the two systems.
- Category game: Form teams to collaborate on finding words that relate to a given topic. The team with the most correct words receives a point for that category. The topics come from material covered in previous classes, such as major building elements, services, types of residences, building details, and building materials.
Vocabulary:
- circulation
- site
- pedestrian
- vehicular
Materials:
- markers
- handout of city map
Comments:
In discussing sites, we covered the elements
involved in our exterior environment and how this affects the way we
build, including types of landscaping and land forms and the ways we use
them in building. We talked about building on the side of a mountain
versus over the water or how trees benefit our environment by providing
shade and protection from wind.
The "circulation map" exercise explored the ways that the built environment is designed for both pedestrian and vehicular movement systems. The students received a section of an urban plan and with two markers, using one color for the walking route and another for the driving route, the students traced their path, beginning at one point and proceeding to a second. Upon completing both routes the students turned over their papers to reveal the varying "circulation systems" that they had created.
At the start of the "category game," the class reviewed the basic design principles. An example of game questions was, "What things in the classroom are not my scale?" An individual from each team recorded the group's list, and the group able to come up with the longest list read it off. This activity gave us the opportunity to find out what students had retained and where they had problems. We ended the game by asking who provides goods and services in a neighborhood, a subject which students had been covering in class and which tied in nicely to the topic of neighborhood.
Objective:Investigate the basic techniques of building and the
properties of materials used in building design. The primary objective is
to address the physical nature of structure through demonstration. The
secondary objective is to give the students background on structural
techniques for model building.Activity:
- Demonstrate tension and compression by using four students to act out the forces.
- "Acting Out Structure:" Groups of students act out the bulding elements of column, beam, cantilever, post and lintel, arch, vault/tunnel, buttress, dome and triangulation.
- Characteristics of materials: Students assess a material's characteristics by using a chart on the blackboard that lists possible characteristics.
- Building types: Students are shown characteristic outlines of different building types. Those who guess the type of building correctly receive the handout to color at home.
Vocabulary:
- tension
- compression
- triangulation
- cantilever
- arch
- tunnel
- buttress
- opaque
- translucent
- transparent
- facade
Materials:
- samples of building materials
- copies of building types
Comments:
To convey the architectural topic of structure, the
team demonstrated the effects of tension and compression and used students
to act out methods of building, such as column, arch or buttress. To
demonstrate properties of materials, students were shown a range of
building materials that possessed different properties. A chart had been
devised on the blackboard that stated a material's possible qualities and
its opposite, such as strong and weak or opaque and transparent. Each
student called to the board assessed a material with guidance from the
team and class. The final activity used outline images of building types
and the students were to guess what the drawing represented. A temple
facade might represent a library or museum, for example. Students who
guessed correctly received the building facade to decorate on their
own.
Objective:Begin planning for the final project of planning and building a neighborhood.
Activity:
- Slide show: Show samples of building elements to introduce how to discover a building's function using its elements as a clue. The slides also make possible a discussion and questioning of previously covered material.
- Facade vocabulary: Students fill out a handout of a facade with arrows pointing to the building elements .
- Students choose a building type for the final project from a list was compiled for a community's needs. The students will work on individual drawings of their building in the last session.
Vocabulary:
- turret
- cornice
- dormer
- dutch door
- balcony
- balustrade
- railing
- panes
- bay window
- picture window
- french door
- shingles
- weather vane
Materials:
- facade handout
Comments:
The visual nature of the slides was a wonderful
catalyst for discussion and questions and also a good exercise to get
students thinking about how buildings express their purposes. This will
help students with their models.
The final project will be a revisit of the first project in which the students built an environment without considering the community as a whole and its needs. The final project will be executed in a planned fashion using the knowledge students now have about architecture in a community. We compiled a list of the choices that the students made of the models they would build, making sure it was proportional to a community's needs, for example, having one post office with housing rather than five with no housing. Each student will work on a drawing of his or her building and find recycled materials at home, a list of which we gave them.
Objective:Students understand how a building's architectural make-up is decided by its use and user and how that building fits into the overall make-up of the neighborhood.
Activity:- Model drawing: The students draw how they imagine their buildings should look.
- Final project: Each student executes a model of the building type he/she chose the previous week.
- Presentations: Students share with the class those attributes of their building that make it type specific.
Materials:
- found, recycled items
- glue & scissors
Comments:
We allotted time at the beginning of class for
students to draw an image of their chosen building type. Meanwhile the
team organized the incredible amount of materials that the students
brought in, dividing the materials equally among the students.
The team spent most of the time in class working individually with the students, giving them guidance on their drawings and models. Students made changes in their building method, no longer just stacking items and later deciding what they represent, but deciding beforehand what they might represent and how to place them. A few students, however, got distracted by over-using one particular material, toothpicks, because sticking toothpicks into things was easy and fun. One student did, however, use his toothpicks to create a fence around the yard of his post office. Examples of other ways in which students used materials include a clear top off a syrup container to create a skylight on top of a shoe box home and toilet paper tubes to fashion the tall chimney of a factory. Many students used signage for their buildings to further distinguish their functions.
At the end of class each student was given the opportunity to stand and explain the function of their building and what they had done to express this function.
