Penn Architecture classes team up with professionals

Brian Loring and five classmates studied a floor plan of Penn High School’s Instructional Materials Center spread out on the table before them.

Loring placed images of drawn-to-scale furniture as he and his classmates worked on designing a collaborative learning space. Then, Loring paused and consulted with Kiel Thode, a professional interior designer with Business Furnishings, and revised his original plan.

Penn High School teacher Josiah Parker created a Design Charrette opportunity centered around the IMC for his Architectural Design, and Civil Engineering, and Architecture – Project Lead the Way classes.

“A Design Charrette is a brainstorming meeting with all stakeholders of a project together to speed up the design process and get many things worked out together,” according to Parker. “This is for the students and is not part of the actual design or the timeline of these spaces, although there is great potential for some of these designs to be used when/if the time comes.”

Parker stated that Penn High School is in the process of designing and studying the possibility of incorporating collaborative spaces into the school, and he has turned that into relevant learning opportunities for his students.

Penn High School principal Steve Hope visited with the students during the learning event, and shared perspective regarding Penn’s needs.

“It was great to see our architecture students working on interior spaces,” Hope said. “The true test of a building's design is how well the occupants work and live in that environment.

“Post-modern architects and designers have moved well beyond creating aesthetically pleasing or even novel designs to creating spaces that support working and living communities,” Hope said. “This is taking Louis Sullivan's thesis of form follows function to the ultimate conclusion where traffic patterns, energy use, sustainability and transformable space. Our students did a great deal of research on how students want to use and interact in the space and incorporated that research into their plans.” 

Loring, a sophomore at Penn, appreciated the real-world learning opportunity that Parker’s project enabled.

“I was able to get better input into what we were working on, by being able to talk to professional designers,” Loring said. “It’s a lot better than when we work on something by ourselves.

“I really like this kind of learning,” Loring continued. “It’s interactive. It’s engaging. I think all of the students have a better learning experience, working together on a project, and working with people from the real-world.”

Jake McQueen, a junior at Penn, plans to pursue a career in architecture and interior design, so the real-world connection was valuable.

“We gain a lot of architectural design experience, as well as interior design experience working with all of the different components of a project like this,” McQueen said. “The opportunity to work with professional interior designers is really valuable. They show us how things work in the real work.I think it’s really important that Penn offers classes and projects like this. It’s important for me, because I want to go into this field.”

Parker set up the Design Charrette for students to collaborate with professional interior designers through Mark Macheca of Business Furnishings.

Thode, the lead designer for the Penn project, and Kelly Olson, Marissa Odom and Adrienne Michaels were at Penn recently to work with students.

“I appreciate the time and effort the team from Business Furnishings put in to give our students this amazing real-world experience,” Parker said. “Not only did they get to work with designers who practice this every day, but they were able to work on a real project that will impact them at Penn. It was a great experience for everyone involved.”