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Building Our City!

The first group of elementary architects!

After weeks of planning, designing, and drawing, we finally got a chance to start building! One third grader asked me every week, “Are we going to build the city today?” When the students arrived in class, they each got a foam core base with their floor plan affixed to the top, and a bag of “walls” labeled with letters.

Components for the airport

Using the floor plan drawings they created as a guide, the students labeled the spaces on the base, and then drew windows on their exterior walls if they wanted to add them.

The models are 1/8 scale (1/8″ = 1′-0″), just like our floor plans. Some students were surprised by the size of their models! This was a good lesson in scale. We discussed why the houses had walls that were much smaller than the airport or the school.

Finally, after all the models were assembled, it was time to lay out the city! The students worked together, using their city planning skills, to place each building. They also used drafting tape to designate roads.

Our completed city and elementary architects! Look closely for the building labels.

I am so proud of what the kids accomplished this session! I think I learned just as much as they did!

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Space Planning and Floor Plans

An excited third grader, working on his design of a military base!

For the past two weeks, we have been adapting our bubble diagrams into floor plans. This is not an easy task – it requires us to really look at the size of our spaces and their relationships to each other. 

We started by assigning dimensions, in feet, to each of our spaces, and writing them on the bubble diagrams. We are using the floor tiles again to visualize how big a space with be in real life. We look at the size on the floor and make a decision about the design. This is a great exercise for honing visual-spatial skills. 

Our hospital floor plan is coming together nicely!

Using graph paper, we then started drawing our floor plans, making sure to account for circulation, doors, and windows. Over the next two weeks, I will be cutting out the components for our models, and we will begin assembling our buildings in week 7! 

I am so proud of how far the kids have come! They are going to love seeing their city come together!

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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!