Box city: Education applied to the real world

This week 350 city planners and architects will present a new city to the public. However, the buildings are ankle-high and the workers still have recess.

Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders in eight Salt Lake schools have been toiling for the past eight weeks building the city — all the while getting an up-close and personal look at the world of architecture.

The program, Educating Elementary Children Through Architecture, was developed by members of the Young Architects Forum of the American Institute of Architects Salt Lake Chapter.

Program developers created an eight-week unit by taking architectural lessons and tying them specifically to the standards and objectives in the Utah state core curriculum.

"We did this because architecture is such a great way to be creative," said Kristin Hill, architect and co-chairwoman of the Box City project. "I work with a lot of teachers, and I just hear it all the time, 'We don't have any time to be creative, we don't have any time to do anything interesting with the lessons anymore, because we are so busy teaching to the core.' "

Hill said the project aims for both creativity and core learning, and students walk away remembering what they have learned.

During the unit children went on neighborhood tours to identify what type of architecture to use in their communities. They learned about city planning — how city plans develop and how streets are laid out on a grid. They analyzed city plans from Rome, New York, Paris and Philadelphia. And they learned about the scientific method and putting hypothesis into plan.

Hill said it tied together math, science, social studies, visual arts, language arts and technology, all into a collectively creative project.

"What we have discovered as architects is that most people in our transportation-based community — going from the garage to the gas station to work — don't really engage in architecture, they don't really understand why something looks the way it does, they don't understand their part in their built environment," said Hill.

But students who participated in the program, many of whom say they are considering the profession when they grow up, have learned to look at their environment with a different eye. They can measure buildings and areas with their hand or their stride and they can find the "rhythm" of a building.

With the skills students picked up in the lessons, they built the entire city true to a given scale.

Richard Papalia, 10, built a four-story "Best Western" out of a cereal box. Robert Wang, 10, fashioned an origami bird and turned it into one building's emblem. He then named it Crane Barber Shop.