We hope this guide will provide you with information and inspiration for creating classroom activities about the Laurel Highlands.
Full Curriculum
Download the entire Laurel Highlands Curriclulm at one time.
About This Guide
This study guide was made possible by a grant from the Katherine Mabis McKenna Foundation. Using sites in the Laurel Highlands, the guide is intended to introduce students to structure, function, and appearance in the built environment as a way of understanding how architecture and design tells the story of how people live, past and present.
Learning from Architecture: Architecture as Object
Our earliest learning experiences involve direct interaction with objects—we see, touch, taste, smell, and hear them and use what we have learned to formulate our understanding of the world.
Making the Familiar Strange: Analyzing an Object
Examining an object can enhance our powers of observation, generate new perspectives, and lead us to think in new directions.
A Few Words About Object-based Learning
From the preceding exercise, we can clearly see that object lessons can be interdisciplinary. We used rubber bands to look at history, physics, archeology, music, economics, measuring systems, games, ecology, fashion, sociology, travel, technology, and aesthetics.
What is Architecture?
This is a good classroom exercise based on an activity from the Skirball Cultural Center to get students comfortable talking about architecture and defining what it is.
Shapes—Building Blocks of Architecture
Architecture can seem overwhelming. By breaking it down into shapes, it can become easier to identify, understand and discuss.
The ABCs of Balance
Balance is the consideration of visual weight and importance. Balance can be symmetrical and evenly balanced or asymmetrical and unevenly balanced.
Why Buildings Stand Up
All structures depend upon invisible forces to hold them together and to allow them to support extra weight. These exercises will help students see and feel these forces to better understand how and why a building stands up.
Communicating How a Building Works
Architects commonly use drawings to explain to people how a building will be used (floorplans), how it will stand up (sections), and how it will look (elevations). You can use a simple but noble vegetable, a bell pepper, to help students understand these different types of drawings.
Acquisition of Information and Levels of Inquiry
Now that everyone has a basic understanding of architecture, we can use architecture as a lens to question everything!
Level I: Acquisition of Information
Now that everyone has a basic understanding of architecture, we can use architecture as a lens to question everything!
Level II: Organizing and Processing Information
Now that everyone has a basic understanding of architecture, we can use architecture as a lens to question everything!
Level III: Diverging from Known Information
With documentation from Levels I and II, an architect can now take the known and recorded information and use it as a point of departure, discover patterns or systems of organizations, and create new ideas or designs.
Synthesis: Bringing the Sites and Ideas Together
Using information they have generated from the previous three Explorations, students will compare and contrast their data to make decisions about the following: their personal preferences, a building’s relationship to its site, the rationale for a building’s design and construction, an architect’s role in the design of the building, and the building as an artifact.
Affective Questioning
Experiences have an affective, or emotional, component as well as cognitive ones. It has been shown that affective responses connect directly to someone’s memories of the experiences which produced them. This can be very useful in an instructional setting, since it encourages the learner’s comprehension and retention of concepts.
The Wright Idea: Using the Words of Frank Lloyd Wright to Understand Space
Use Frank Lloyd Wright quotes about his architecture to look at buildings in the area. We’ve also included a few quotes from transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings were read and appreciated by Wright.
Visual Representation: Architecture in Your Mind’s Eye
Part of designing a building is being able to imagine it before it’s built and conveying that vision to others. Architects may want to activate certain senses, include a spatial memory from a previous experience, or allude to nearby landscape or building features when designing a building. You can help your students develop their minds’ eyes in very simple ways, which will help them understand how to think like an architect.
What’s in a Name?
The act of naming has power and significance. Giving something a name helps define it. A name can be used to identify, clarify and nurture. Names can be used to reflect a quality perceived as already present, or chosen to imbue the thing to be named with a hoped for quality or attribute.
Programmatic Architecture
Programmatic (also known as mimetic or mimic) architecture is characterized by constructions in the forms of objects not normally associated with buildings, such as characters, animals, people or household objects.
Zeitgeist: Architecture is not Alone
Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is very much influenced by what is happening around it, spatially as well as culturally. Zeitgeist is the German word for “time-spirit” and refers to the general moral, intellectual, and cultural climate of an era.
Climate and Building Design
To be successful, architecture most respond to and protect itself from the surrounding climate. Architects usually take climate into consideration in 2 basic ways before designing a building.
It’s Got Rhythm: Listen to the Building
Some have called architecture frozen music, although few have called music melted architecture. In 2000, performance group Puzzle of Light created and performed a sound sculpture concert based on their experience of Fallingwater.
Poetry: Building with Words
Architecture and poetry are aesthetics with an underlying structure that holds them together. Poetry can be seen as “an art of conventional signs marching along in time” and architecture as an art of signs spatially arranged. Each art form can help us understand the other. In these exercises, students will use poetry to gain insight into architecture.
A Sense of Space: Describing an Experience with Architecture
This exercise is a perfect introduction to the State Theater, Fallingwater, a building in Brownsville or on the National Road, or to any architectural discussion. It focuses attention on sensory experience and helps students observe and document their observations.
Walk Around the Block
You don’t need to travel far to create meaningful units on the built environment. For teacher residency programs at Fallingwater, we have investigated Ohiopyle and Brownsville, but you can use your own school or neighborhood to start your students identifying architectural elements, looking at urban planning, and delving into local history. This exercise in visual literacy uses an inquiry approach to understanding community heritage.
Art of Building Notes
Southwestern Pa Architectural Heritage Notes