The Familiar Neighborhood.

Everyone lives in a special place. To a young person, the neighborhood is often understood as a collection of special places, with little knowledge of its overall layout or how people's decisions have shaped the way it came to be. Jean Piaget believed that exploring one's physical surroundings was an extremely important process in a child's growth and development, and through the Learning By Design:NY Program in New York City, many students and teachers have started on this path--out the door of the school and into their own neighborhoods.

Learning By Design:NY, the K-12 built environment education program of the New York Foundation for Architecture, Inc., works with local schools to broaden young people's awareness of the built environment and enrich the school curriculum through interdisciplinary design activities. Design is a creative decision-making process that combines math, science, social studies, technology, language arts and visual arts. It helps students make meaningful connections between their own lives and what they are learning in school.

Through the lens of design, the local school neighborhood provides a rich resource for strengthening students' visual literacy and critical thinking skills; for developing a better understanding and appreciation of history and geography; for finding real-life applications for abstract math and science concepts; and, for enhancing students' written and verbal communication skills. As one student put it, "It makes children like me have lots of fun learning, and not even know it!"

Developing Visual Awareness

The architects and designers who teach with Learning By Design:NY, an affiliate of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, often begin a classroom residency program by showing slides or overhead transparencies of neighborhood buildings to the class. Students are always excited to see familiar sites recreated in their classroom, and in this focused setting, are able to look at them in a more thoughtful way.

Finding Architectural Features

By projecting the image onto a large sheet of white paper taped to the wall or blackboard, the students and/or the teacher can outline important features of the building with a magic marker, guiding students to notice new things about the buildings they pass by everyday. While individual students come up to trace different features, others follow along at their desks, creating their own drawings on blank paper; very young children can trace over a photocopy of the slide.

By tracing the geometric shapes in a building facade, students discover patterns, symmetry and symbolism normally overlooked in these familiar buildings. We also use this technique to look for the structural elements in a building or to illustrate new design vocabulary students are learning, and create a classroom architecture poster. At several points during the process, the projector is turned off to help students sec how simple geometric shapes or building parts work together to create a complex building. This activity is always a prerequisite for a neighborhood walk, because it greatly heightens students' awareness of familiar sights and hones their observation skills, preparing them for sketching outside.

Designing a Collage 

For younger students, we often also add a collage activity before the neighborhood walk, in which students design their own building facades using shape cutouts. This reinforces their ability to see a complex building as a sum of its parts, and gives them first hand experience in making the kinds of decisions that form their physical environment. This is also a good opportunity for creative writing, as students have plenty to say about the buildings they have designed.

The Neighborhood Walk

The next session is often a neighborhood walk. Armed with pencils and sketchbooks, or simple manila folders with paper stapled into them, the students head out to explore their neighborhood through designers' eyes. Using "walksheets" created by the design educator to focus students on particular aspects of the neighborhood, students hunt for and draw different types of doors, windows, roofs, decorations, and other building elements they see.

Sometimes we look for clues to a neighborhood's history and development, comparing historic photographs with what students see today. If there are deteriorating, unused, or other troublesome places along our walk, we ask them to think about how these areas might be better used or improved through design.

Understanding the Larger Context

With students' awareness and interest piqued by these introductory activities, the class can begin to tackle the bigger picture of how the neighborhood developed and how it fits into a larger urban context

Depending on the teacher's goals, this may focus more on history--how the neighborhood looked in the past, or on urban planning--how it might look in the future. History is often thought of as an abstract and difficult concept for young children. However, we have found that historic maps and photographs, usually available from the public library for from a local historical society, provide students with concrete and sometimes shocking evidence that the neighborhood has not always looked the way it does, and that others have lived there before them.

Neighborhood buildings are chronicles of past lives and customs, and by analyzing a building's shape, size, materials and location, students learn to read the visual clues their neighborhood presents--a skill they carry with them long after the project is over.

Finding Your Place

Using slides of maps and aerial photographs, students can compare the various patterns that exist in human settlements, from small villages to large cities, and see how their own area is laid out. Students learn to read the maps and to locate their school, their homes, their routes from home to school and other important places in the neighborhood. A large composite map can be made with all these places marked on it. Base maps are usually available from municipal agencies such as the Department of City Planning. We also talk about what a neighborhood is, and the key components needed in order to make it a desirable place in which to live, work, and play. We ask the students to brainstorm about the things they would like to have in their neighborhood that aren't currently there, and any improvements they would like to make.

Students' Design Projects

Ultimately, our aim is to have students create a representation of their neighborhood as they envision it with improvements. For the lower grades, this can be as simple as a street scene composed of a series of building facades created by individual students from colored paper, and mounted together on large sheets of paper. This phase of the project brings in the concept of scale. We determine an appropriate scale for the project in advance and either provide or have students draw a scale figure that they will use to size doors, windows and floors of their building.

As the streetscape takes shape, they also use these scale referents to create other people, dogs, trees, cars, and so on to enliven their neighborhood. Older children are introduced to scale rulers and learn to transfer measurements they make of real spaces around them into scale sizes that will match their classmates' drawings.

A Model Neighborhood

Alternatively, students can create a three-dimensional model of a street using recycled milk containers and cardboard cartons covered with construction paper or painted to make the building's walls. Using other collage materials and markers, students can design or replicate the architectural features of the buildings in their model neighborhood. Oaktag is one of our favorite materials for this because it folds, cuts and glues easily and is sturdy enough to create balconies, stoops, awnings and other three-dimensional aspects of buildings and a streetscape.

Though the themes of our projects are similar, each one is developed in collaboration with the teacher to suit the particular neighborhood and meet the teacher's curricular goals. Our neighborhood architecture affects us everyday. A greater consciousness of it not only expands students' school experiences, but should also empower them to take a more active role in preserving and improving their communities as they grow older.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students analyze contemporary and historic meanings in specific artworks through cultural and aesthetic inquiry.

Catherine Teegarden is a program coordinator for Learning By Design:NY in New York City. Jerry Maltz is the steering committee chair for Learning By Design:NY.