Revealing Animal City Habitats: Simon helps his team with their bee habitat
Bee City and Beeville were just a couple of the bee habitat models constructed yesterday by Year 6, St Paul’s Whitechapel Primary School, with help from LOM as part of Open-City’s Architecture in Schools summer programme.
Made from coat hangers, lollipop sticks, pipe cleaners and card the concept schemes were based on sketches and ideas the class had developed for the brief ‘Revealing Animal City Habitats’ and their chosen honey bee ‘clients’.
In small groups the pupils discussed their initial 2D sketch designs and collectively chose one to model. Annie, Tané and Simon, architects from LOM, then helped their teams to develop their ideas in 3D considering the needs of bees, materials, form and structure.
Simon Bird, senior associate, said: “It was a fun session and a great introduction to design for the class. The kids were really creative and they managed to produce five very different and interesting designs from hanging bee hives to tower bee hotels. I can’t wait to see how they now develop these designs and represent them in drawings.”
The designs will be entered into an inter-school competition with the winning entries displayed and announced at a special awards ceremony for pupils, teachers and parents.
This is the first time LOM has taken part in Architecture in Schools which last year saw over 500 pupils from 14 London schools partner with 40 architects to learn more about the built environment and improve their skills in Maths, Art and Design Technology.