Blueprint for Innovation
A student points out the blueprint showing the final product
Building Community Through Local Partnerships
How do you teach students to roof without a roof? Or put up drywall without a wall? The answer is surprisingly simple: you bring the building to them.
Such a building, or kit, is being created by students and faculty at Wentworth’s School of Architecture and Design in partnership with YouthBuild Boston. The components—including floors, roofs, and walls—will be digitally fabricated in the Wentworth architecture studios. The group will also have access to equipment in the Autodesk space in the Boston Seaport, where Robert Trumbour, associate professor of architecture, has a residency.
“The idea is that this... [will] become a sort of classroom that can travel,” explained adjunct professor Danyson Tavares, Architecture ’11, M. Architecture ’12. “But its use will evolve based on needs and context.”
“This is the first generation of the project,” added Trumbour. “We’ll learn what doesn’t work and what works Well, and then we’ll make changes. To use the analogy of software development, we’re in the beta version right now and the end users will improve on it over time.”
The kit is designed to be disassembled and easily transported in a pickup or box truck. The fully assembled structure will measure nine feet by nine feet; for now, it exists as a three-foot by three-foot model in Wentworth’s architecture studios.
It’s a passion project for Trumbour and Tavares, who is also a project development manager at YouthBuild Boston. Tavares, who has taught architecture at Wentworth for over a decade, has been interested in this type of work since he was a student at Wentworth. When he switched from a traditional architecture career to working at YouthBuild, partnering with Wentworth to introduce young adults to the equipment at the Autodesk space, hosted by the leading architecture and engineering software provider, was a natural next step.
“Historically, [YouthBuild] students have never been exposed to digital fabrication,” said Tavares. “The ability to bring them to Autodesk and show them this pathway into construction, manufacturing, or industrial design opens up their minds to [so many] different careers.”
Digital fabrication is increasingly becoming part of the architect’s tool kit. The process—using software and hardware in combination with an individual’s own design thinking—can produce industrial design objects, architecture, city planning, and anything in between.
“The environment that we live in, from the toasters and coffee makers that we use in the morning to the buildings we walk into, traditionally all of those things have been made by hand,” Trumbour explained. “And now, in most cases, they are manufactured by machines. But ultimately, we as designers need to be able to understand how those machines work and really leverage what is possible with them.”
But the duo is hoping to impress more than that on the YouthBuild students.
“The other aspect of this collaboration is that we’re teaching the Wentworth students who are going out into the field how to actually engage with the community,” said Tavares. “That’s a super important part of this—how to make sure that the voices and identities of the communities they work with are being accounted for in their work.”
It’s the fact that Wentworth and YouthBuild are a part of the same community that makes this collaboration a natural fit: Wentworth’s campus is literally a five-minute walk from the YouthBuild Boston offices in Roxbury, where many of the participants also live. For Tavares especially, the connections go even further. Two Wentworth alumni—Neil Daniel, Architecture ’18, and Emily Chowdhury, M. Architecture ’21 now work at YouthBuild in The Designery teaching and mentoring high school students.
“We’ve all been champions in this space of... [giving] folks in our community access to design and to architecture and all these things,” Tavares said. “As someone who’s an alumnus who is really passionate about Wentworth... it’s a perfect storm. I think it just naturally fits.”
Class of 2023 architecture students on this project included Ben Caron, Lucas Chichester, Sam Clough, Dante Egizi, Cat Evans, Alex Garcia, Nicholas Leighton, Jake Lipinski, Alissa Oliveira, Kaitlin Pettenger, Sam Sawyer-Standley, Amber Vuong, and Riley Waggoner.
