Friday, February 25, 2011

Designing Houses With Frank Lloyd Wright

The setting for Blue Balliet's The Wright 3 is the Robie House in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.

Researching the house, led us to the website of the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, the organization currently responsible for the care, and upkeep of the house. On their website we found, not only a virtual tour of the restoration of the house, but also a terrific curriculum guide for The Wright 3, and a link to Architect 3D Studio, where my older girls (ages 10 and 11) spent the afternoon, yesterday.

The program, which reminds me of a scaled down Zoo Empire, allows students to choose clients, and a sight location, and then to design a house that will meet the needs of both. Houses are designed on a 2D blueprint, but then can be viewed in 3-dimensional representations. Frank Lloyd Wright (or an animated version of the architect), pops up from time to time, with helpful advice, as children choose everything from window placement, to furniture, and landscaping.

Bravo to the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, for providing so many useful, and engaging, architectural activities for children, free of charge.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

6 comments:

Joyful Learner said...

I will be revisiting this when K gets older as I plan to do a unit on him. I'm hoping to visit Falling Water in PA to see for myself one of these days. The 3-D program sounds like a lot of fun!

Christy Killoran said...

This sounds really neat! I'll have to check it out.

Joyful Learner said...

I just tried it and designed a cool waterfront property but the program disconnected before I had a chance to save! Make sure to save! Very easy program and fun to do, by the way!

Susan said...

You always have such great resources to offer and fun ideas to try! We are starting a new link-up on our blog to share favorite resources. I'd love to have you share!! Please check out http://thegettys.blogspot.com/2011/02/favorite-resource-this-week-invitation.html if you might be interested :0)

Ticia said...

Sounds kind of like simcity I used to love that game

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

Great link. I am going to save it in my Evernote "for later"