| ah! ah! we always thought
| pedagogy and design studios
| had a future somewhere!
| by the way, any news about the
| seemingly groundbreaking
| architecture education courses
| we have been hearing so much
| about lately?
Architecture Fills a Need
Enter Public School 20 on Essex Street, and you’ll be greeted by the
safety officer sitting at a desk designed and built by the students. An
early project in their Architecture and Community Studies Program,
sponsored by the Abrons Arts Center, it’s a charming reminder of how
practicality and imagination can merge in the hands of children. Howard
Stern is the Teaching Architect who heads this twoyear program. He
introduces architecture, tied in to curriculum in the fourth grade, and
a school improvement project in the fifth grade. “We do something that
the school needs,” says Howard.
Jeanette Rabbe’s fourth graders studied colonial America this spring.
Howard invited me to see the cardboard models of fully furnished
colonial houses they had made. Students were practicing their
“presentations.” Joshua introduced his team and explained their house’s
diminutive contents: A butter churn, handmade soap in a basket, and a
spinning wheel for mom to make clothes.
The fifth grade school improvement project was to design capitals
(decorative elements) for the top of columns in the lunchroom. Nasif
Akanda, 10, who attends Sara Joseph’s class, opined, “Architecture is
how you look at things. It gives us a new vocabulary to communicate
unique observations.” Josuha Jimenez thought that a flower design was
“adaptable for the capital project and very creative.”
cont'd....
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