Architecture Day at Blackheath High School – January 2020
Nisha Vekaria, Director of Place 54 Architects has over 14 years’ of experience which encompasses all stages across a diverse range of projects and has used her experience in the architectural profession to feedback to aspiring designers and architects.
Nisha joined Blackheath High’s Design Department and other GDST Alumni Katie McAdam of Morgan Sindall and Francesca Payne of Radley Yeldar, to host Architecture Day 2020 at Blackheath High School.
With around 100 Year 6 and Year 8 students working together in one room all day it promised to be organised chaos – and was! Students worked in mixed teams of eight to design and build a tower from newspaper and masking tape. The brief was for the tower to be as tall as possible and be self-supporting. The winning teams were awarded prizes for elegance, innovation and triangulation.
Following a quick break, students then divided again into groups of four and were given a brief to design and make a model of part of a school – a library, chemistry lab or chill out zone for example.
Nisha with the other Alumni gave a talk on how and what they had designed and built as inspiration to the students. Speaking about “A day in the life of an Architect” and the people and professions you interact with on the journey to create a building. Teaching the students how you can work together using everyone’s individual skills and combine them to create great design and buildings.
One of the great opportunities this event allowed was for opening the students’ minds to possible careers in the construction industry and given them an insight into the world of design.
The outcomes from the “creating a school” exercise were from the practical to the insane and made us wonder how each team having similar design briefs could produce such diversity! At the end of the day we assembled “our school” together before a proper critique of the designs with some fantastic questions, answers and explanations of design decisions.