Category: Learning by Design

Learning By Design:NY, the Center for Architecture Foundation’s K – 12 architecture education program has been active in city schools since 1996, pairing architects and design educators with classroom teachers to integrate the study of architecture and design into the school curriculum. For the past three years, home-schooled students have also been able to participate in this hands-on design program using the Center as their classroom. Continue reading “Home School at the Center”

On 11.22.13, the Center for Architecture Foundation (CFAF) hosted an Architecture College Fair. More than 100 high school students and families from New York City, Connecticut, and Northern New Jersey attended the event held at the Center for Architecture. Faculty, admissions officers, and alumni from 12 schools offering degrees and/or majors in architecture at the undergraduate level participated, including Boston Architecture College, University at Buffalo, City College, Cooper Union, Cornell University, Drexel University, NYIT, NJIT, Parsons The New School, RPI, Roger Williams, and Tulane. This year marks the first time CFAF has hosted the event, taking over from the AIA New York Chapter and the AIANY Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA). The transition coincides with the announcement of a new scholarship to be awarded in 2014. The Walter A. Hunt Jr. Scholarship fund was established to honor the retirement of Walter A. Hunt Jr., FAIA, Vice Chairman Emeritus of Gensler. The scholarship will assist New York City public high school students pursuing a degree in architecture at an NAAB-accredited school of architecture in New York State. Continue reading “Architecture College Fair Connects Prospective Students with 12 Universities”

What do the Renaissance villas, tree houses, and mosques on display at the Center for Architecture have in common? They were all designed and built by students in the Center for Architecture Foundation’s school and vacation programs, and are gathered together in the “Building Connections” exhibition, which opened on 11.14.13. This annual exhibition showcases K – 12th-grade student design work from the CFA Foundation’s Learning By Design:NY school programs and Center-based vacation studios. The exhibition’s designers, Jill Ayers and Rachel Einsidler of Design360, created colorful graphic icons that highlight the range of topics covered in these programs, illustrated by the projects in the exhibition. An accompanying activity guide provides short explanations and drawing activities to help younger visitors engage with the exhibition themes. Continue reading “Building Connections Exhibition Opens at the Center”

Over Columbus Day Weekend, 10.12–13.13, the Center for Architecture Foundation welcomed more than 300 families to the Center for the sixth annual OHNY Weekend Family Festival, held in conjunction with openhousenewyork weekend, now in its 11th year. The fun, free, drop-in event was sponsored by the Foundation and openhousenewyork, along with our program partners, the Museum at Eldridge Street, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Landmark West!, Noble Maritime Museum, and Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District. Continue reading “The Center for Architecture and openhousenewyork teamed up for OHNY Weekend Family Festival 2013”

On 10.08.13, the Center for Architecture Foundation’s Young Patrons hosted their first event at Knoll’s new mid-town showroom. Seventy rising design stars came together for a fun evening filled with snacking, sipping, and designing, sponsored by Arenson and Knoll. Continue reading “Center for Architecture Foundation’s Inaugural Young Patrons Event Proves If You Build It…”

“Practical Utopias,” the Center for Architecture’s new exhibition on global architecture firms’ work in five Asian cities, organizes a wealth of visual and textual information around one neatly oxymoronic title phrase and five simple, potent adjectives. Along with generating a productive tension between practicality and utopianism, these built environments in Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo are connected, dense, green, thick, and fun. That the exhibition and the accompanying high-profile panel also embodied these five concepts might go without saying, but it deserves to be said. These conversations attracted a crowd dense enough to pack Tafel Hall, developed thick layers of discourse connecting specific questions of design with multidisciplinary considerations, and touched on pressing environmental concerns. And inevitably, any evening bracketed by Daniel Libeskind, AIA’s humane, poetic, historically-grounded design sensibility and Thom Mayne, FAIA’s formidable, rapid-fire syntheses of cutting-edge theory with common sense provided more than the usual share of fun. Continue reading “Amid Layered Paradoxes, Five Cities’ Utopian Experiments”

For those who missed this year’s Association of Architecture Organizations’ annual conference in Boston, 09.26.13–09.28.13, here is an armchair tour of a few of the highlights. The theme of the conference, “Making and Measuring Impact,” focused on the importance of telling a clear, coherent, and engaging story about what we do and why we do it. “We” were a loose grouping of staff and volunteers from architecture centers throughout the U.S. and abroad, as well as students, architecture professors, designers, staff from art museums, tour companies, and other organizations interested in making architecture part of the public discourse. Continue reading “Report from the Field: Association of Architectural Organizations 2013 Conference”

On a crisp weekday evening, a dozen architecture enthusiasts gathered at the Center for Architecture for “Reading the Streetscape: Bleecker Street” – a walking tour of Greenwich Village history hosted by the Center for Architecture Foundation (CFAF). “This is sort of an Architecture 101,” said Tim Hayduk, CFAF lead design educator and tour guide, at the outset. “It’s almost a vertical archaeology, with layer upon layer of construction.” Continue reading “On Bleecker Street, a History Tour in Brick and Steel”

The Center for Architecture is a tad bit quieter today than it was just a few weeks ago when the exhibition spaces were filled with the bustle of 250 school-aged children who spent their summer exploring architecture and design. For nearly a decade, the Center for Architecture Foundation (CFAF) has hosted Summer@theCenter. The immensely popular programs sell out thanks to the wonderful partnerships established with local architects, designers, businesses, and cultural institutions related to the built environment. CFAF’s summer programs bring 3rd-12th- grade audiences through the design process, and the experience is enhanced exponentially by visits to cutting-edge sites such as the QueensWay, small architectural practices including Marpillero Pollak Architects’  work/live space and Adam Kushner’s breathtaking design/rebuild home and studio. The staff at Anderson Architects presented their retail work to students enrolled in the Store Design studio, while Heintges explained their important role in curtain wall technology to students in the 21st Century Skyscraper studio.

Continue reading “Summer@theCenter 2013: Many Contributors Equal One Great Big Success”

The Center for Architecture’s youth and family programs took an engineering turn as both our FamilyDay@theCenter program on 07.27.13and week-long Summer@theCenter camp explored bridge structure and design. Eighteen families, with kids ranging in age from 3-13, attended the two-hour Saturday Family Day workshop where they learned how different types of bridges support weight and span a distance. Images of bridges around the world illustrated each bridge type, then young participants were called up to test large structural models of beam, truss, arch, and suspension bridges. Kids were able to feel and better understand the forces at work as they stood in for the towers, anchorages, and piers of different bridges. Continue reading “Bridge Bonanza at the Center for Architecture”