The Oregon Summer Camp That Sends Kids Home Thinking Like Architects Through Creative Problem-Solving

A nine-year-old is politely but firmly debating the location of her imaginary library’s front door in a Eugene classroom. She has an opinion, a pencil, and a ruler that is a little too large for her hand. According to her partner, the door should be on the east side. She doesn’t agree. Scenes like this give the impression that something more than a craft project is going on. These children are not merely sketching structures. They are learning how to defend a choice.

That is the unspoken goal of the long-running Oregon program Architects in Schools, which expands into a virtual camp accessible to kids all over the state every summer. Since its founding in 2003, the Architecture Foundation of Oregon has grown the number of students it serves annually from about 800 to over 5,000, spanning from Portland to Southern Oregon and the coast. The summer camp version is looser and shorter, but it is based on the same concept: give kids design tools and watch how they use them.

They mostly take the adults in the room by surprise. Third graders who suddenly grasp scale are described by teachers. On the way home, fourth graders begin to notice rooflines. According to Sophie, a fifth grader cited in the foundation’s own materials, collaborating with classmates to create a community was her favorite aspect. It’s a short line that’s easy to pass, but when you see a group of kids actually attempt it, it takes on a different meaning. They argue about parks, argue over where the grocery store should be located, and draw streets that loop in ways that no city planner would approve.

The curriculum is straightforward. A ten-year-old can somehow relate to Victorian gingerbread trim thanks to basic drawing techniques, floor plan lessons, and a visual survey of architectural eras. Next are the more important questions that the program focuses on: What makes structures stand up? In twenty-five years, how will cities appear? What does the term “green building” really mean? These aren’t questions about trivia. These are the kinds of questions that architects debate at conferences, but now children wearing mismatched socks are chewing on them.

Working professionals such as architects, engineers, contractors, interior designers, and occasionally architecture students who are still developing their own portfolios serve as their mentors. They put in about twenty hours of volunteer work, mostly in the classroom and the remainder in planning. It’s a strange conversation. The experts arrive with the intention of instructing, and many of them later acknowledge that they had to reconsider their own presumptions. It turns out that a child’s question about why a hallway must be straight is a helpful distraction for someone who works in the field of straightening hallways.

Everything about it has a slightly countercultural quality. In order to reassure parents about future employment markets, the majority of enrichment programs for children of this age focus on robotics, coding, and STEM acronyms. Architecture is in a distinct register. It moves more slowly. more tangible. A child is prompted to consider the room they are in, the neighborhood outside, and the shadow a building casts at four o’clock in the afternoon. It almost doesn’t matter if that translates into careers. It appears to translate into attention.

Oregon’s relationship with its built environment has long been complex, as evidenced by the timber towns, the infill controversy in Portland, and the wildfire rebuilds along the southern corridors. The program’s administrators might have an idea that goes beyond a craft hour. It’s not insignificant if the children creating the floor plans this summer wind up voting on zoning in thirty years.

But for the time being, June is here. The camp begins the week of the 22nd. A child is about to be informed that her library can have a door wherever she desires.⁖※⃻⃹⃎