Last month, Banwell Architects had the opportunity to host six of the Upper Valley’s finest young aspiring Architects from the 8th-grade classes at Lebanon Middle School, Hartland Elementary and Crossroads Academy for a Job Shadow Day. This event is a means for Banwell Architects to connect with the local community and a chance to share the passion we all have for what we do in this profession.
While Job Shadow Day featured some fun activities, including an actual walk through the office and a Virtual Reality experience navigating one of our projects, it wasn’t all fun and games! We put these budding Architects right to work.
The Problem:
We presented a two-part problem to the students. The first dealt with memory. The class was asked to envision and depict the plans of something quite familiar: the homes they live in. They demonstrated some impressive recall! A key skill for an Architect is the ability to mine one’s own experience for both desirable conditions worth replicating and for unsuccessful aspects of the built environment to avoid when envisioning the future. In the spirit of this type of critical awareness, we asked the class to recall and report on a favorite aspect of their own home design, and to comment on something they would change given the opportunity. They offered some compelling insights.
The second part of the problem was to transition from reflection to action. The students were asked to draw a home, sited on Mascoma Lake, of their own design for an imaginary, Astronomer client. In this exercise we required the plans be drawn to scale utilizing graph paper and architectural scales. Once the home designs were sufficiently established, we threw in a brief site planning exercise in which they were tasked with locating the home within predefined boundaries of the site. Finally, the projects were presented to the Banwell team for some feedback over lunch.
It was fun to watch this small group transition from cautious and quiet, to engaged and enthusiastic through the course of the day. Hopefully, they learned something, and the experience has reinforced their interest in the field. The students showed poise, thoughtfulness, good presentation skills and responded well to feedback. We’ll be looking forward to Job Shadow Day again next year!
