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Beginning Building Design

This week’s class was so exciting! We started designing buildings to put together our city. it’s looking like we will have a school, a hospital, a few stores and restaurants, an airport, a military base, and a couple of houses. 

  • One of our third graders designing a house
  • A fourth grade student designing a restaurant
  • One of our fifth graders discussing ideas

Using the planning technique of bubble diagrams, the kids started laying out their buildings based on the simple programs they chose. The programs list 5 – 6 spaces that are required, two adjacencies, and some exterior door and window requirements. 

Most of the kids added extra spaces to their designs. I love the creativity!

The bubble diagrams allow us to look at spaces in relationship to each other, both in terms of size and location. We can tell that our school cafeteria, for example, is larger than a classroom. The actual dimensions of the spaces are not yet figured out. 

A fifth grader drew a fantastic bubble diagram of a school

Next week we will begin to draw scaled floor plans of our designs. We may need to make some decisions about what extra spaces to eliminate in order to fit our buildings on their selected sites. 

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City Planning

This week, we started planning our city! When I asked the kids what types of buildings we should include, I expected the list to include houses, schools, stores, and offices; I did not expect airports, military bases, and water treatment plants! These kids continue to amaze me.

One of our fourth grade students working on a bubble diagram

Using the list we created, I showed the kids how to draw bubble diagrams. These are some of my favorite planning tools in the design process. Bubble diagrams are loosely drawn spaces or “bubbles” with lines connecting the spaces that should be directly adjacent to each other. Quick bubble diagram sketches are a great way to study space relationships quickly before starting to layout floor plans – or site plans in this case.

Two of our third grade boys working on a bubble diagram

Working in small groups, the students created some bubble diagrams of their ideal cities. I found it interesting that the girls put government buildings at the city center, and the boys chose a hospital as the hub. I let them pin up their drawings to present to the class.

Next week I will distribute programs for individual buildings and assign a site to each student. Just like professional architects, they will have to design their building to meet the program requirements and to fit within the site constraints.

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What Is a Floor Plan?

We had another great class this week! I asked for a volunteer to explain floor plans, and every hand went up. Last week we learned that a floor plan is what a building would look like if you cut all of the walls with a sword at four feet above the floor. Third grade boys love the image of slicing through walls with a sword!

I loved seeing the kids start to make sense of their drawings! The floor plans are taking longer than I expected, so instead of moving on to elevations this week, we focused on our plans and how to translate some of our classroom elements into scaled, 2-D drawings. We learned how to draw doors with the correct swing, base cabinets with a sink, and some tables.

One of our fifth grade students drawing a door on her floor plan!

Before we can start designing buildings to put together our city, we need to learn about programs, and how they translate into building design. The program is what informs the floor plan when designing buildings. It has design criteria information like what spaces should be included, how big the spaces should be, and what adjacencies are important to how the building will function.

I sent home an assignment this week to get the kids thinking about the spaces of buildings they are familiar with, and how they are related to each other. I asked them to analyze a building they choose: Their home, school, church, daycare, etc. Using the worksheet, they will list the key spaces of the building, put them into groups based on size, list a few key adjacencies, and list the rooms that have windows or doors to the exterior.

Next week we will talk about what they discovered in doing the Intro to Program exercise, and they are going to choose what building they want to design for our city. Then, I will give them some pointers on how to start turning their programs into building designs!

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Our First Class at Elementary Architecture!

We had a great first class today! I asked the kids what they wanted to learn about architecture and got some really great responses – everything from, “is a triangle really the strongest shape?” and “I don’t really know what this class is about,” to “I want to learn how to draw houses better.”

Before we can start designing spaces, we need to lay the foundation, so to speak, of thinking in three dimensions. We will do this by using some basic measuring and drafting techniques to translate the built environment – in this case the classroom – into its basic 2-dimensional architectural drawings. This will help the kids understand what the lines on a drawings represent and help them to visualize their own creations!

The students learned how to use a tape measure and they worked in teams of two to measure some objects around the room. We even learned some tips to help estimate the size of a room if you don’t have a tape measure, or if your tape measure is too short (like ours were)! Hint: Ask your student how big the classroom floor and ceiling tiles are!

After looking at some floor plan examples and discussing the concept of scale, we started to draw a floor plan of the art room. We will finish it next week and move on to interior elevations to give height to our room.

We have so many fun things to do in the next 7 weeks!