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Adventures in
Architecture: A One Week Summer Camp for Near Northside
Middle School Students
 Middle
school is a crucial time for a student. The transition
from the fairly protected and controlled environment of elementary
school to the much larger, more confusing, foreign atmosphere of the
middle school is intimidating to many students. The level of
individual attention decreases. It is easier to get
lost.
Programs that are small, focused and different from the routine can
engage a student and give him/her a different way to see all his/her
studies.
Adventures in Architecture is just such a program. It uses
math,
observation, language arts, social studies in a different
way. It
applies them to something real—to the neighborhood the
students
live in.
Houston’ Near North Side is a declining area, separated by
Buffalo Bayou from the gleaming towers of downtown. It was
developed in the late 19th century to house rail yard
workers.
After World War II the decline of rail traffic and the lure of the
suburbs precipitated changes in the neighborhood. In 2005
Preservation Texas added Houston’s Near North Side to its
list of
“Most Endangered Historic Places.”
By offering Adventures in Architecture to students of Marshall Middle
School Fine Arts Academy—a Houston Independent School
District
magnet school—AIA Houston will enrich their educational
experience and inform them and their parents of the historic value of
their neighborhood and the role they can play in preserving and
restoring it.
Faculty members from the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College
of Architecture and the Rice University School of Architecture joined
with practitioners to serve as faculty for the program. Guest
lecturers and tour hosts included a preservationist, contractor, head
of a bayou preservation group, a city planning official, and an
architectural historian.
Each day’s program included a morning talk, work on the
design
problem, and an afternoon tour. The design session for a
house in
the neighborhood examined the elements of design, urban design,
sketching, and modeling. Tours of an architect’s
office,
the City planning department, the neighborhood itself, a construction
site, and a school of architecture provided insight into the
processes of architecture, construction and city planning..
The Near North Side has gained a cadre of people who understand their
neighborhood in its historic context and may work to preserve
it.
Houston Independent School District has a body of curriculum materials
adaptable to other classroom situations that could be added to programs
in other middle schools..
AIA Houston plans to continue and enlarge the program in subsequent
years reaching out to other underserved neighborhoods.
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