Thursday, March 29, 2007
BY ELIZABETH MOORE
Star-Ledger Staff
Under the watchful eye of the sixth-graders at the Essex Fells School, a new community began to take shape yesterday afternoon.
Students took turns setting up housing, commercial areas, schools and green spaces on a large paper town, quickly realizing that planning a community isn't easy.
"It was hard to place the school where it would be convenient for everyone," said Drew Bradley, 11.
The community building exercise was overseen by Livingston architect Justin Mihalik, who visited the Essex Fells School yesterday on behalf of the NJ chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Mihalik told students that architects strive to make beautiful and functional buildings that make a community enjoyable for its residents. He outlined principles of livable communities and talked about making communities friendly to pedestrians, protecting the environment and restoring urban centers.
"It creates what we call a vibrant community," he said. "We want people to live there, to shop there and to worship there."
Mihalik was one of about 150 architects who fanned out to schools across the state yesterday, with the goal of speaking to 5,000 students, in honor of the national AIA's 150th anniversary.
Yogesh Mistry, coordinator of the school project for the Newark/ Suburban AIA chapter, said this is the first time the architects have done an organized visit to so many schools.
"It's a good thing for young minds to learn because in the future, they're going to be shaping the environment for years to come."
Architect Ron Weston, who visited students at Glenfield Middle School in Montclair, had his students build a town using a computer program and said they understood the concepts right away, "They didn't want to put a school next to a railroad track."
Weston said he hoped the architects would teach students not only about what they do for a living, but how to make communities more livable for future generations, "It's an impressionable time to reach out to students."
After Mihalik's lesson in Essex Fells, the students set out to create their own model communities. "I put a lot of houses away from factories so they wouldn't hear the hustle and bustle," said Jonny Crowther, 12. "And I put a school near a baseball diamond so children could play on it," said Annie Finney, 11. Orion Crandall, 11, said, "I put the houses close together so friends could talk together and picnic areas near the houses so they could have social time together."
Not all of the planning went smoothly. Some students realized they'd placed the homes far from jobs or transportation and others clustered all the apartment buildings in their town together. "I don't like factories near my house," said Meg Doelp, 12.
After finishing their model community, the Essex Fells students said they had a better idea of what it takes to make a community accessible to its residents and the challenge of incorporating urban and rural features into a town.
"When you build a community, you probably want it to (appeal) to all people," said Tommy Haversang, 11. His classmate, Saxon Buehning, 12, said, "This is a good lesson. I didn't know too much about architects. It was good for us."
Mistry said the New Jersey chapter members will get together to talk about the school visits and consider making more of them in the future. "We want to get feed back from the people who participated and maybe do this on an annual basis."
He said the chapters have additional projects planned for their group's national anniversary. Members are currently reviewing submissions for the 150 best buildings in New Jersey, which they will announce later in the year.