Thom Mayne Young Architects

THOM MAYNE YOUNG ARCHITECTS TURNAROUND ARTS

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Program Leadership Thom Mayne, FAIA Skye Ruozzi, Pratt Institute ‘16 Yeshu Tan, Pratt Institute ‘ 20

Young Architects Kimberlin de la Cruz Baptista, 5th Grade David Dejesus, 6th Grade Carlos Devers, 5th Grade Ernesto Martinez, 5th Grade Delancey Petrie, 6th Grade Milayna Roman, 5th Grade Chefren Spodnik, 5th Grade Matthew Stephenson, 6th Grade Jay Tavares, 6th Grade

Bridgeport Leadership Tania Kelley, Turnaround Arts Local Program Director Cynthia Fernandes, Hall School Principal Lighthouse After School Program

Program Duration January 2017 - May 2017 Mondays and Fridays 2:30pm - 5pm Total Classes: 20 Total Contact Hours: 50

Software SketchUp MakerBot

Location Hall School K-6th Grade Bridgeport, CT

HALL SCHOOL

Thom Mayne

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TURNAROUND ARTS

The Thom Mayne Young Architects program is a pilot project initiated by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne, a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) since 2009. Founded by former Chair of the Committee, Michelle Obama, Turnaround Arts is an arts education program that connects the Committee members esteemed artists in the fields of music, theater, painting, film, and architecture with elementary-age students in bottom-5% performing public schools around the nation.

In the Spring of 2017, Mayne commenced a tri-generational education program that connects Pratt University architecture student interns as mentors to 5th and 6th-grade students at Mayne’s Turnaround Arts sponsor-school, the Hall School in Bridgeport, Connecticut. For-matted as an after-school design club, the two intern teachers formulate and share a design curriculum of two school visits per week, with Mayne offering guidance throughout.

The program focuses on teaching real-world skills that engage and motivate students to develop a passion and ethic for lifelong learning, while developing practical computer design skills. The students begin the program with basic concepts and compositional techniques, then apply those skills toward computer-aided design using SketchUp 3D modeling software and a MakerBot for 3D printing their models, eventually resulting in a beautification proposal for their school site.

Because of its inherent multidisciplinary nature, architecture is an ideal vehicle for inspiring enthusiasm for math, science, engineering, as well as history and humanities.

Architecture-in-spired learning lends the optimism and opportunity, resources, personal connections, and a greater world view which helps elementary-age students learn and apply knowledge, devel-op their sense of self-value, discover latent talents, connect to local role models, and bring value to their school experience. Through career exploration, skill development, and mentor-ship, the program begins to carve out a pathway to high school internships, jobs, and college enrollment for underserved youth.

This work can not be fulfilled without collaboration with the Bridgeport community.

Thom Mayne Young Architects looks forward to strengthening bonds with local architects and educators and wishes to thank the community for its support.

Thom Mayne Young Architects is sustained by a generous grant from the Connecticut Architecture Foundation and support from the Housatonic Museum of Art and Turnaround Arts.

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Part One

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CONCEPTUAL EXERCISES

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Friday January 27, 2017

Topic

Thom Mayne Young Architects Design Club Intro & Point+Line Exercises

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi and Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Understand the fundamental terms of architecture, point and line, and the relationship between them •Demonstrate openness in trying new ideas, materials, methods, and approaches in making works of art and design

Activity

Students are asked to randomly draw ten points on letter size paper and draw cross lines based on the intersecting points. Then they draw diagonal lines to connect the ten intersecting points. Finally, they are asked to fold the paper along the diagonal lines to create a relief model.

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Monday January 30, 2017

Topic Fields

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Understanding that repetition can create nuances in the variations of pattern

Activity

Fold along grid lines in four directions. Physically manipulate paper. Notice that different people performed folding operations in different orders and it affected the malleability of their papers in different ways. Photograph the crumpled papers in strong directional light.

Print photos. Study the figure / ground and select either the figure or the ground to highlight on the paper.

Comments/Notes

Students firstly wanted to find shapes in their artworks.

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Friday February 3, 2017

Topic

Composition

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Understanding of composition in 2D photographs and drawings

Lecture

Students are asked to answer the question:” why does this work?” Students develop a good sense of composition based on the theories learned from lectures.

Activity

Students are asked to fill out four squares: point, line, shape, combination to create 2D abstract drawings.

Comments/Notes

The lecture is very productive since all students are very active and ask questions. And they can apply their newly learned theories and concepts to their own work.

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Monday February 6, 2017

Topic

Transforming Planes

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal •Identify and apply transformational actions to understand and control tiled patterns

Activity

Manipulate an index card to create a custom irregular polygon that can be tiled by sliding a cut out to the opposite side. Change or create a new index card polygon by rotating the cut out to the adjacent side. Change or create a new index card polygon by flipping cut out to the opposite side. Students then trace to tile any or all of their favorites/successes.

Comments/Notes

Nearly all students find precision challenging.

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Friday February 10, 2017

Topic

Space and Cubism + SketchUp Intro Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Students are asked to answer why the cubist drawings by Pablo Picasso convey a feeling between two dimensions and three dimensions. They understand the role of shadow in the drawing.

Activity

Students are asked to cut out the printed cubism drawings and divide them into two groups of pieces: illuminated pieces and shadow pieces. Then they need to rearrange them based on the “shadow theory” in the lecture to show their own creation of cubism. Color coding is a way to increase the contrast between light face and dark face.

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Monday February 13, 2017

Topic

SketchUp Components

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Students learn basic working SketchUp tools and commands, including how to draw to a desired scale and how to use components.

Activity

Students use basic Sketchup tools to set up a workspace with a top down parallel projection view. They create a specifically sized component and array it into a grid. They then edit the component with realtime tiling effect occurring in the grid.

Comments/Notes

It took a lot more time than anticipated to get the students used to the camera view and the snap points for moving components. They are excited about 3d modeling, and enjoy a few minutes of free time at the beginning and end of the lesson to play around with the volumetric tools.

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Friday February 24, 2017

Topic

Rule-Based Formal Exercise---Subdivision

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Students need to understand how to use rule as a restriction to generate abstract spaces within a 10” x 10”x10” cube. They need to familiarize different types of materials by using “material” command in SketchUp.

Activity

Draw a perfect square first! Students are asked to use “shapes” tool in SketchUp and type accurate dimensions to make sure they can draw a perfect square quickly. Then they need to work on 2D drawing from the top view based on the rule: subdivide lines by connecting midpoints. They use “pull/push” tool to pull all the geometries upward 10” first to make a perfect cube. Then they push some of them downward to touch the midpoint of each vertical edge to create solid-void space. Finally, they are asked to apply different types of materials to the spaces they created to experiment with the quality of transparency, translucency and opacity.

Comments/Notes

We spent so much time to figuring out how to draw a perfect square because many students do not understand how to use the keyboard to type inch and foot. They had a hard time to find the midpoint at the beginning but they really enjoy creating void spaces and playing textures once they got a handle on the fundamental modeling tools.

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Monday February 27, 2017

Topic

Rule-Based Compositions

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal •Define a consistent rule set.

Activities

Divide three squares along grid points using a consistent tool/operation.

Comments/Notes

Extrude the defined shapes to set heights.

Rotate the extruded volumes to align with the x, y, and z axes. Overlap/intersect the volumes. Use the section cut to find an interesting section.

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Friday March 3, 2017

Topic

Cube Movement & Serra List of Verbs

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

Architect needs rules and reasons to help them understand design operation and tackle the design problems. In this exercise, students need to pick the verbs from the Richard Serra verb list as a guide and manipulate the cube movement by mainly using SketchUp commands: “rotate”, “shadow”, “move” and “pencil”. They are required to learn how to “save as” the picture after choosing a nice view and use the school printer to print out their own works.

Create artist statements using art vocabulary to describe personal choices in art-making.

Activity

All students are asked to use verbs to describe the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; the skyline of Manhattan; and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. They are asked to use “3D text” command in SketchUp to type the verbs (3 min) they want to work on. Many of them choose “drop”, “rotate”, and “shift”. They use lines, triangular shapes and rectangles to represent the track of movements. The process is that they need to design a movement for each verb first and combine those movements together in the end under the “instruction” of verb.

Comments/Notes

Students are super interested in this exercise. Some of them break down the “drop” movement into many phases: shift, rotate, flip and split etc. And some of them automatically throw and drop their pencils, erasers and even mouse to observe how objects move on the earth. They not only learn the tools of SketchUp but also have a deep understanding of different verbs and relate them back to architecture.

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Monday March 6, 2017

Topic

Complex Volumes

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Basic SketchUp tools: work with curved edges, rationalize complex volumes, set sequence of camera perspectives

Activity

Use guidelines to define a set of squares within a rectangle. Students next use curve tools to draw two complex lines within the boundaries. Students use offset tool and edit curve into a face. They then push/pull the faces to create two extruded geometries. Rotate and merge the extruded geometries to create intersecting volumes. Remove exterior faces and edges to expose interior intersected geometries.

Comments/Notes

Students get frustrated with the guidelines/layout portion. The precision of measuring and alignment within the initial setup is difficult for their basic utility of the Sketchup tools.

However, the students excel in the more intuitive form making, while most of them respect the boundaries of the guidelines. While using a scale figure was encouraged, most of the students do not aesthetically appreciate the default Sketchup figure, preferring to delete them.

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Friday March 17, 2017

Topic

Presentation Session & Rule Based Components Modeling

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

Presentation: •Understand how to prepare design projects before presentation. Ex: line up all the drawings in a organized and clear way •Understand how to present clearly and specifically design works to audience.

Ex: introduce yourself, eye contact, where should stand, use finger to specifically point out the key part, listen and response questions and describe project by using professional terms etc.

•Understand how to compliment and criticize peer’s works •Be quiet, patient and focused during the presentation. Respect presenter.

Exercise: •Use rule-based operation as a guide to design 3D spaces from 2D drawing •Be familiar with the “rotate 3D” tool in SketchUp

Activity

•Create two 10’*10’ squares as the boundary •Subdivide orthogonally and diagonally by connecting the midpoint •Erase the extra shapes from outside to inside to create your own component •Choose the orthogonal component first and copy the component and •Use “rotate 3D” tool to change the orientation of each component •Match those components by matching perpendicularly the nutch

Comments/Notes

The presentation session is very successful and productive because most students can speak loudly to explain their cube movement process. Most students are eager to ask questions and critique their peers’ work. Many girls stand up and point at the drawing to strengthen their arguments.

Many students complained that the “rotate 3D” tool is really hard to control. But it is the key of this course to help students to be familiar with the basic modeling tools. In the end, many students didn’t finish two models but they had really good understanding of controlling their designs by rule based operation.

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Monday March 20, 2017

Topic

3D Printing Intro

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Learn to survey a space, draw a scale drawing, convert drawing into 3d model •Introduction to 3D printing

Activity

Students were given overview of 3d printing settings and 2 students printed their models from previous Sketchup session during the class.

Comments/Notes

For the 3d printing session, students got to witness a print error, where the spool was jammed, and the filament stopped extruding part way through. This was a valuable lesson in the necessity that all of the steps of the 3d printing equipment be checked before starting a print to ensure its completion.

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Part Two

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SITE ANALYSIS AND PROPOSALS

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Monday and Friday March 27 and March 31, 2017

Topic

Bodies in Motion: Collage

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi and Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Identify and apply compositional techniques to combine photos into composition. Define narrative. Generate and apply rule sets. Work in multiple scales simultaneously. •Students need to understand how to use collage as an abstract tool to represent their body movement. •How to use the basic architectural languages point, line, and shape to help them distinguish the body joint, motion track and space.

Activity

Students cut and arranged stills from their movies. They used compositional techniques to create collage schemes that reinforce narrative. Define rules to representation. Use diagramming techniques in conjunction with rules to make another layer of information atop the collages.

Based on the previous exercise, students are asked to use either point or shape to design a body movement diagram. The key here is to use geometric shapes and graphic tools to distinguish the furniture, door, window and body to clearly convey the idea of how a body performs in the existing space.

Comments/Notes

Team II had a hard time cutting color papers to show the gestures because it is not easy to transform the profile from the picture to paper. It gets easier when they are asked to cut out lots of triangles to map on the pictures.

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Friday April 7, 2017

Topic

Site Modeling (Final Project Intro)

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Basic understanding of architectural scale, units, and perspective •Basic understanding of measuring techniques •Basic understanding of SketchUp modeling •Basic understanding of circulation strategy

Activity

Students are asked to measure and sketch the corridor and transform the sketch into computer drawings to fully understand space in three dimensions. One team should measure all the key elements in the corridor. The second team should use SketchUp to construct the model. The third team should improve the detail such as windows and paintings on the wall.

Comments/Notes

Coordination is always a challenge for them. What really surprised me is that they can identify the skill they are good at, speak up to the group, and organize the team by themselves.. It is very productive this time because the students learned a lot of SketchUp techniques from the previous sessions.

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Friday April 21, 2017

Topic

Design Agendas for New Hallway

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Basic understanding of architectural scale, units, and perspective •Basic understanding of SketchUp modeling •Basic understanding of circulation strategy •Identifying and adhering to a concept with a design strategy

Activity

Students teamed up to come up with a new proposal for circumnavigating the hallway between the main building and the library/computer annex. Each team had to define the concept title for their movement agenda. They had to explain how they would alter the navigation of the hallway, possibly why, and use Sketchup to model their intervention in the existing hallway model.

Comments/Notes

When discussing the content of the lecture, the students were asked to use adjectives to describe some of the projects they were seeing. I was astounded by one student’s use of words like “eruptive” “fractured” and “splintered”.

Teams: Team Unicorn selected the widest portion of the hallway, and decided on a social and economic agenda: a bookstore, “The Swan”. This team had a strong intuition and design for the function of the space. When it came to the form, they had greater difficulty criticizing and editing their work Team Kops selected the portion of the hallway where the double doors to the main building open. Their project title “Future/Jump” is easily an apt interpretation of the 3D model. The way the subtracted platonic solids would cause the user to jump/step over and the shape is reminiscent of a sci fi teleporter or stargate.

Team Terminators selected the portion of the hallway where the single door to the annex opens. They did not finalize a project title, but loosely knew they wanted to do some sort of alternative threshold (ideas of tunneling through existing walls, or secret doors hidden behind paintings). We talked about the perspective of that particular corner, and how they could potentially both provide a new doorway while obscuring the existing one.

Team Markiplier’s project title is Consecutive Direct Image. This student designs intuitively in Sketchup. I didn’t even fully understand his design from the perspectives, only when moving through the 3d model. His design has an optical illusion quality at its root, that is effective.

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Monday April 24, 2017

Topic

Design Agendas for New Hallway

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi

Skills Goal

•Basic understanding of architectural scale, units, and perspective •Basic understanding of circulation strategy •Identifying and adhering to a concept with a design strategy •Understanding and utilizing model making as a design tool

Activity

Student teams used 3D printed models of their selected hallway portions as a base to test out their designs. Using Bristol board and tape or hot glue, the students tested and attached their scale models in the 3D printed hallway portions.

Comments/Notes

There were various degrees of success with using the model making as a design tool. For longer activity sessions like these, students need a midway break to exert energies and refocus.

Team Unicorns paper model showed even more strongly their functional desire for the installation. The customer side of the installation has a strong projection of shapes. The backside has easy accessiblity from the curved side.

Team Kops had determined to recreate their SketchUp model as the physical model. This was important moment in trying to realize their digital design in real space. They worked through problems of precision (how does one make a perfect circle? tracing!) and craft.

At the end, the physical model did differ from the SketchUp model in accommodating for door swings and a final move of sliding the surfaces to create an offset condition among the elements.

Team Terminators was focused on how the installation could provide for different circulation in the hallway. Their original idea of tunneling and obscuring struck a image of hiding from a predator, like a fire-breathing dragon! They designed some dragon-inspired spikes embedded in the ground and growing from the wall.

Team Markiplier: The original SketchUp model was difficult to realize in the real world due to gravity. The team incorporated string as another element in the model to mount the hanging planes. They edited the model for perceived constructability and clearance for use of the hall.

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Friday April 28, 2017

Topic

Scheme Design in the Hallway

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Basic understanding of the relationship between space and structure, human scale and architecture scale, light and shadow, function and aesthetics, experience and emotion.

Activity

Choose key words (verbs) as concepts to generate a spatial structure in the corridor.

Comments/Notes

Two teams have a strong concept about what they intend to do.

One particular student is very talented in coming up with a concept. He has a very special thinking process which is a little bit fuzzy to me because I can not read the concept directly from his design. However I find it is quite fascinating in his project because the uncanny moment always comes from some seemingly unreasonable thought. For example, I asked him why he put a long and slim triangular plane above the corridor. He can not answer that.

But without the triangular cantilever, his project would be very even and less dynamic.

I start to push the kids to pursue the direction that they think is right. It might sounds a bit irresponsible. But existing rules and standards always kill kids’ creativities. Even though this exercise is mainly driven by a general direction which is a word that they choose from the Ricahrd Serra verb list, they can fully express their subjective thoughts and attitudes about the site. Then they can actually make these designs their own.

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Part Three

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INSTALLATION DESIGN

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Friday May 12, 2017

Topic

Pattern Study and Design Proposal

Teaching Yeshu Tan

Skills Goal

•Understanding of the relationship between materials and geometries, and the installation and the site

Activity

Students are asked to subdivide a square by using straight lines. They need to apply different textures to the geometries to represent different visual aesthetics. By rotating the 3D model, pulling and pushing those geometries, the flat shapes are transformed to a relief model.

Comments/Notes

This is a very fun exercise that gives kids lots of opportunities to explore the ambiguity between 2D and 3D, texture and geometries, and light and shadows. They all have their own preference of the colors and textures. I asked them to choose the textures from one category in order to keep consistency. One student chose a set of textures using points, lines, and shapes that created an optical illusion where 2D triangles create a three dimensional effect.

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Monday May 15, 2017

Topic

Installation Modeling

Teaching

Skye Ruozzi and Yeshu Tan

Activity

In the final session, we mainly focus on tackling the corner condition in the hallway based on the previous design proposal. Students need to cut the cardboards to many triangular geometries and attach with the patterns which are from previous drawings. They are asked to fold the cardboards to many spatial components and aggregate different components to create a complex folly. The key of this exercise is to push students to tackle the relationship between the cardboard installation and the hallway. They need to consider the accessibility, light condition, visual communication, and scale of kids and adults. By the hands-on modeling class, they fully understand the difference between the digital model and the physical model in terms of gravity, scale, dimension, and materiality etc. And finally they are able to build something new and exciting that they never tried before.

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Architects //

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BIOGRAPHY

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Hall School Students Kimberlin de la Cruz Baptista

Matthew Stephenson

Kimberlin has been a member of the Hall family since grade one. Her interests include, gymnastics and acting. She has been in the school musical for two years in a row. She was part of a select group of students who danced for the Superintendent’s Convocation. She is a member of the Architecture and Design Club. Kimberlin enjoys building and being creative.

Matthew has been a student at Hal School since grade 2. He received the Bridgeport Excellence in Education Academic Award at a ceremony on May 22, 2017. Matthew enjoys basketball and is particularly skilled in Mathematics. He was one of the original members of the Architecture and Design Club.

Jay Tavares David Dejesus

Jay has been a student at Hall School since kindergarten. He is an integral part of the Hall family. He is a winner of the Lighthouse tennis championship. He has also won the badminton championship for two years straight. He is an original member of the Hall Architecture and Design Club.

My name is David Dejesus and I came to Hall School in the 4th grade. I have been at Hall for 2 years and I like that the teachers here give a good amount of homework and are very fair. At Hall School last year, I was a stage manager, and this year I joined the Architecture and Design team during after school. What I like about the Architecture and Design Club is that we get to show our creativity in an art form.

Carlos Devers

Pratt Institute Intern Teachers

Carlos joined Hall School in second grade. His interests include basketball and baseball.

This is his first year in the school musical. He is a member of the Lighthouse Championship tennis team. He is a member of the Architecture and Design Club. He enjoys creating projects.

Skye Ruozzi SKYE RUOZZI is an architectural designer with a focus on architectural interventions that create new shared spaces. She recently graduated from Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture and previously studied at the Aalto University Wood Program. Her degree project work is currently on display at the Tomorrows exhibit at Diplareios School in Athens, Greece. She has over six years experience with community-driven design-build projects with the International Design Clinic. The work received a Special Mention at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia. She is a founding member of the Transformative Art Collective, constructing and touring with interactive installations for over five years. Their Mantis Garden project was co-created with over 1,000 individuals and received the Mysteria Art Development (M.A.D.) Grant.

Ernesto Martinez Ernesto has been at Hall School since kindergarten. Ernesto enjoys art, gym, and is particularly fond of the way his teachers lead him. Ernesto has created a drawing for our Mock Trial that was framed and presented to a federal judge and his principal. Ernesto was part of Hall’s championship tennis team. He is a member of the Architecture and Design Club. He enjoyed creating buildings and other fun projects.

Yeshu Tan Delancey Petrie

YESHU TAN is currently a junior architecture student at Pratt Institute. His design works have been archived every semester at Pratt so far. Due to his distinguished academic performance, he has received Leo J. Pantas Residence Center Scholarship and president’s list award each semester as well. He has been doing office assistant and computer lab monitor since the first day in college. He is also an undergraduate teaching assistant in design and representation class. Yeshu works directly with Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne at Hall school in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 2017. Currently, Yeshu works at Level Eight Architecture Design, PLLC, with a focus on design in residential and commercial architecture.

My names is Delancey Petrie and I came to Hall School in Kindergarten. At Hall I have participated in 2 plays and performed at Convocation for the entire district. I also am involved with Dance, Drama, the Architecture and Design team during Lighthouse after school. When I graduate this year I am going to miss Mrs. Fernandes, our great principal; and the Architecture Design Team.

Milayna Roman Milayna is a fifth grade student at Hall School. She is eleven years old. Milayna has been a part of the Hall School family since kindergarten. She has been in our school musical two years in a row. She participates in the Lighthouse program. She was part of the Lighthouse program’s Motown dance group and she participates in the Architecture and Design Club. She is particularly fond of the shows and art program at Hall.

Chefren Spodnik Chefren is an outstanding member of the Hall School community. His interests include wrestling and football. He is a member of the Lighthouse Championship Tennis team.

He is a member of the Architecture and Design Club. He enjoyed building and creating projects.

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Senior Architect Thom Mayne THOM MAYNE has been a committed educator in architecture for over 40 years. His firm, Morphosis, is engaged in broader social, cultural, urban, political and ecological issues which he brings to his teaching. Mayne’s distinguished honors include the Pritzker Prize (2005). He was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009, and was honored with the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2000. With Morphosis, Thom Mayne has been the recipient of 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, over 100 American Institute of Architecture Awards and numerous other design recognitions.

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