This project involved twenty-nine 12 year old children (KS 3-Year 7) from Newall Green High School, Wythenshawe, Manchester. 

The project was based on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Scheme of Work – Art Unit 7B/Year 7 – What’s in a building?  

This is the first stage of an ongoing project entitled TRANSFORMATIIONS in which Education @ CUBE is working with the Horse and Bamboo Theatre to develop an introduction to architecture through experiential theatre. The aim of this project is to avoid the public stereotype of a building when viewed externally, in the imagination or in reality, as a large artifact or aesthetic object. The project encourages people to embark on their understanding of architecture from within through the experience of a sequence of sensory spaces, enclosure and structure and only later to work outwards to the external appearance. 

During the first workshop the students were asked to imagine themselves making a journey through the inside of ‘a sculpture’ which was at least four times higher and wider than their own height.

They were asked to describe in words and monotone images the sensory experience of the path they were following inside the sculpture – What can you see? What can you feel? What can you hear? Do the surfaces around you have different textures? Are there changes from light to dark? Is it cold or warm? Is the floor level or does it slope? Does the space have an echo or is it very quiet? Is the space you are passing through sharp and angular or curving and soft? Is the shape you are walking through low and wide or tall and narrow?

Over the next two workshop periods the students constructed a model of the route they had followed in their imagination. This was made from a range of scrap materials – for example – wire, blocks and strips of wood, clear and opaque plastic sheet, cardboard, cloth etc. In making the model the emphasis was on working outwards from the path they had followed in their imagination and constructing the model with materials that would create a variety of textures and lighting effects in the space enclosed.

During the fourth workshop the students re-visited their earlier monotone images and redrew them. In re-drawing them they were asked to consider the lighting effects they felt they had created and to represent the shadows and surface textures of the materials they had used in the process of making the sculpture.

The final all day workshop was organized in the galleries at CUBE where the artists had built their full size version of a sculpture similar to the ones constructed by the students. Although the structure was built on one level the theme the artists chose for the sculpture was that of entering a house through the basement and traveling up to the attic. The difference between the artist’s structure and that built by the students was that the artist’s structure had a range of background music along the length of the journey.

The students had not seen this structure prior to the experience of traveling through it blindfolded and they did not see it after. When they had completed the journey they produced drawings, paintings, wire sculptures and shadow images of the environments they felt they had experienced. In the final session of the workshop the students talked about the mental images they had of the interior of ‘the building’ they had traveled through and a number of them gave an unprompted description of traveling up through the floors of an old house.

A video was made of the project and copies are available from Education @ CUBE