Michael A. Vuksta
You can draw upon your own resources to introduce poems similar to the ones mentioned in the body of the text. I certainly hope that this essay has convinced you of poetry’s ability to enhance the nature and essence of architecture.
A visit to an example of inspired architecture is a must. Another building designed by Louis Kahn is the Yale University Art Gallery. It can be visited on the same trip to the Center for British Art. It is his first major commission. His personal, integrative art first makes itself manifest here.
I intend to take my students to visit other buildings. In them I will look for different uses, single and multiple. If you wanted to meet this need and to look once again at the work of a single architect, Ingalls Skating Rink and Morse and Stiles Colleges by Eero Saarinen would be ideal. The architect Cesar Pelli worked in Saarinen’s office for ten years. He is the former Dean of the School of Architecture and presently has offices on Chapel Street. Arrangements can be made to meet with him to discover more insight into Saarinen’s buildings. Pelli himself has created inspired architecture and can supply a first-hand exposure to the work of a living architect.
I will present my own design to students during the course of this curriculum unit.
All these activities are designed to prepare students for the project which follows.
A CORRUGATED COMMUNITY
“ . . . the physical environment and its measurable objects are the necessary starting points for viewing human-environment interactions.”
“ . . . stimulus impoverishment creates perceptual and learning deficits in the developing child. Conversely, it is believed that enriched environments will accelerate the development of perceptual, motor, and conjunctive abilities.”
“The data are mounting, therefore, to suggest that the physical environment, and the man-made environment in particular, exerts a powerful influence over the perceptual and social development of the child and young adult. Because in most cases, these individuals have little or no control over the nature of this environment, it is especially important that those adults who have control exercise wisdom in selecting alternative structures . . . .”
from
Child Mind Architecture
by John C. Baird and Anthony D. Lutkus
After an encounter with poetry, building site visits, and a presentation of my own design efforts, students will begin a three-phase project. They will build a child-scale room of their own out of corrugated board. (Boxes will be acquired from commercial establishments and other flat pieces will be purchased.)
No more than three sizes of blocks will be made from this board. The construction will simulate masonry and the blocks will serve as both support and infill.
Children will be assigned a measured space in the classroom for which they are to create an enclosure which will meet the following criteria:
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1.) There must be at least three separate framed views inside the room. One of these must be achieved without creating an opening in the walls. (Resources: the study gallery at the Center for British Art; references to John Soane in
The Place of Houses
by Charles Moore et al; and the project by Cesar Pelli and William Bailey in
Collaboration: Artists and Architects
);
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2.) The room must have only one function and purpose, but provision for connecting to another room must be allowed for;
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3.) It must be portable and must be able to be reconstructed in one day; and
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4.) Students will explore ways of connecting their individual rooms to each other.
The end product will then be moved and adapted to a different site inside the school. It will again be moved and adapted to a site outdoors.
The concepts of solid and void, connection and transition, rooms and their organization, the adaptation to site, and other concepts, discussed in the body of this paper, will be investigated and employed.
Children will document phases of design and construction through drawings and photographs. A journal and sketchbook will be kept by each of the students.
The project is expected to take fourteen weeks, meeting twice a week for one hour sessions. Other arrangements will be made for building visits and the exploration of poetry in the six weeks prior to the initiation of the project.
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East Elevation
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North Elevation
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West Elevation
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Ground Floor
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First Floor
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Second Floor
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Courtyard Facade Study (unfolded)
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Roof Study
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Early Plan Study
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Path Place Analysis