projects and articles by members
Shelter for Sun and Water / Workshop
Date: September 2004
Place: at Construction Fair, Ankara, Turkey
Time length: 3 days workhop
Partnerships: Chamber of Architects Ankara Brunch, Building Information Centre, architect Yonca Al Hürol from East Mediterranean University.
Participants: 12 children aged 11-14, 5 students from faculty of architecture, 3 volunteer architects.
Goals/Aims: To make children gain the knowledge of ‘making’, and get an idea about concept of ‘structure’ and ‘construction’. To make children discuss about the construction process.
Methodology: To look for meaning of structure with the daily-life examples by collective thinking. To get knowledge about shelters that are not made by humanbeing. To open the minds and increease creativity, trying to get shelters for sun and water. Making shelter for sun and water supported new experiments with different materials. Being in a Construction Fair also gave chance to children to recognize the usage of materials by taking information from the company’s experts.
Description of Events
First day: Getting together and travelling to Fair Area. Everybody introduced themselves with describing their own room. Discussion about ‘shelter’, showing slates from different types of shelters. Looking for the answers, what the shelter is, what differences it has from house, who make shelter and so on. Get knowledge about the concept of structure by the help of slates and drawings.
Second day: Making small models that will be the shelter for/in/over sun and water in groups. Children had to remember some questions while modelling. Those are; has the sun-shelter to be as big as sun? What do we catch under the sun shelter, sun or shadow? When we design a shelter for water, we protect water from what? For water-shelter, is it enough to collect the water? And many more. They used hand-lanterns as a sun-source, aluminium folio as a shell, wooden sticks, cord, and rope at models. At the end of the day, they chose places for the shelters and visit the companies to get the true material for their shelters.
Third day: Making shelters. Exhibiting products and sharing with experts and visitors.
Outcomes: Realizing that structure belongs to daily-life and shelters are formed according to necessity of which or what will use it. Finding new methods while communicating with adults, even children don’t have any knowledge about the subject.
