We've been collecting a selection of materials to make projects with at
Architecture for Kids. We have been working with a year 5 class (of 9-10 year olds) at
Furzedown Primary School. One really useful resource we found is unwanted estate agents boards. To start with we've made a couple of chairs and they've become a popular addition to the school. All the parts are templated out from the boards. There are no other materials, fixings or adhesives. This means they can be flat packed in seconds and reassembled in a minute (if you can remember where all the bits go).
First quick models were made with scaled down pieces of card to investigate how the chair might look and how the parts might fit together.
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| Test models of chairs. |
Working with the cellular plastic board was a little different because of its structural properties, but was very easy to work with and this enabled ways of making the chair stronger. We made a couple of chairs - the story chair and an armchair.
The story chair lets books be stored in all the structural cells.
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| The Story Chair: a place to sit and read your favourite books. |
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| The story chair back is made so that the structure works also to store books |
The arm chair is has proven to be a good place to work.
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| Sign board arm chair. |
They have attracted a lot of interest in the school and even have their own
blog site: Notes from estate agent's boards which were denied their retirement...
