The Museum School was one of the first museum preschools accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
DESIGN YOUR PERFECT BUILDING IN BUILDING BRAINSTORM
MAY 26 – SEPT. 6, 2010
There’s no place like home, but children and adults can design a dream house together (or a skyscraper or a treehouse) in the new Building Brainstorm exhibition, opening Saturday, May 29. 2010, in the Museum of Science and History’s Fort Worth Children’s Museum gallery.
Visitors will discover a variety of shapes, materials, and building components in a design-studio environment sure to excite aspiring architects, construction workers, and engineers young and old. Designers will not only discover the basics of buildings, but will also explore the process of creating structures that match the needs of the people inside them.
“The built environment encompasses children’s lives, from home to school to grocery store to daycare facility, and yet we seldom think about why our buildings look the way they do, or how we would improve them if we could,” says Carol Enseki, president of Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which created the exhibit. “Building Brainstorm gives kids and grown-ups a chance to explore the shapes and parts that go into a building, creatively respond to challenges just as designers do, and work together on designing memorable, useful structures.”
Building Brainstorm features several “design challenges” that encourage active inquiry, creative thinking, cooperative experimentation, and conversation—and result in creative design and construction solutions.
Visitors step into a kid-friendly studio environment inspired by the philosophy and aesthetic of mid-century designers Charles and Ray Eames, filled with architectural plans, photographs, models, and authentic building elements. Interactive workbenches and job sites are equipped with materials and tools that inspire diminutive designers to brainstorm creative solutions for various architectural or engineering challenges. Each individual exhibit is set up so that people can research, design, model, and test their own building ideas—creating an exciting and welcoming environment where children and their caregivers can consider how the buildings in their community were designed by people just like them to meet specific criteria and usage needs.
For example, in the 3-D realm, the Block Challenge provides an opportunity to create whimsical or practical structures and test their stability in varied terrain. To experience curved, angled, and square building shapes from a different perspective, young visitors can make their own crawl-through structures out of lightweight frames, connectors, and fabrics at the Inside Shapes Challenge.
Another aspect of building design becomes clear at the Window House Challenge, where designers can experiment with changeable clear, translucent, and opaque panels in a house made completely of windows to see which combinations produce the best living conditions. The Floor Plan Challenge provides a chance to explore spatial organization and how people use rooms; visitors can create a scale model (a 3-D blueprint) for a dream home and then outfit it with appropriately sized walls and furniture. Interior Design Challenge lets young designers design a virtual house on a computer—down to the carpet patterns and wall colors in each room.
Throughout the exhibition, graphic panels provide information about environmentally friendly building and construction practices, and invite visitors to think about ways they can make their designs “green.”
Building Brainstorm will be on display at the Museum of Science and History May 29 through September 6, 2010. Admittance is included with Museum exhibit admission: $14 for adults; $10 for children (3-12) and seniors (60+).
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Building Brainstorm was created by Brooklyn Children’s Museum, in collaboration with the Center for Architecture Foundation in New York City, as part of the Youth Museum Exhibit Collaborative (YMEC), a consortium of nine leading North American youth museums. Upon closing in Brooklyn, the exhibition will move on to tour other YMEC museums in Boston; Fort Worth; Houston; Hull, Quebec, Canada; Memphis; St. Paul; San Jose, Calif.; and Sausalito, Calif. This bilingual exhibition is presented in English and Spanish. Its exhibit components and related educational programs support U.S. elementary curriculum standards in mathematics, visual arts, technology, and science through hands-on activities that encourage inquiry-based exploration.
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