Yesterday, three shipping containers arrived on the REALM high school site, steps from the door of Studio H’s woodshop. These three containers will be the structural armature for an outdoor flex space our fifth/sixth period students are designing and building. As a program, Studio H responds to the social and economic context of our community, and as a group, we decided that our first responsibility is to our school community. Because of constrained facilities in our new high school location, there is a great need

A few weeks ago, our fifth period class started a project called “Unit(ed) We Stand,” in which students designed a small-scale cardboard building unit in two dimensions, which could be put together to create a 3-d enclosure. Students learned how to use the laser cutter and Adobe Illustrator to draft and cut hundreds of the units, then prototyped a structure made from them. Then we took it to full scale, cutting hundreds more of the units at a larger size, by hand (no laser cutter

In collaboration with Ms. Wu’s 10th grade English class, we did a quick cross-disciplinary project in which students wrote six-word manifestos for their life, and then used Adobe Illustrator and the laser cutter to produce a poster. For back to school night, all 100 posters were put up on the main wall in the high school woodshop building. The manifestos were developed through a writing exercise in Ms. Wu’s class, and then the design and production skills developed within Studio H. Each student wrote an

In our year-long Studio H (advanced) course, we have begun the year by looking at an individual 2-dimensional unit and how it can be aggregated into a 3-dimensional space. Starting small-scale, we designed the units themselves, tessellating them graphically so that they could easily be produced on the laser cutter. Once each group of five students had a designed 2-d unit, we produced 100 of them to begin building. At a 2×2″ scale, the pieces are at about 1/6 the size of the final product:

To kick off our semester-long Studio H (basic) course, which we teach first and second period to a total of 50 REALM sophomores, we went back to basics: the sketchbook. The sketchbook is an essential tool and document for designers, architects, artists, and creative professionals. It is both a tool for studying and understanding the world, catalog ideas, and coming back to them days, weeks, and years down the road. It is both a record (noun), and a tool to record (verb). In order to

Earlier this year, we announced our bittersweet departure from Bertie County, and this summer relocated Studio H to an amazing charter school in Berkeley, California. REALM (Revolutionary Education And Learning Movement) is a free public charter school (middle and high school) in West Berkeley, in its second year of operations. We joined the school because of its revolutionary spirit, dedication to educating the whole child, and gritty implementation of project-based learning. We arrived in early June and built out our shop/studio space. While space is

04 June 2012 Dear friends and supporters, After three years of living, teaching, and building in rural Bertie County in eastern North Carolina, Project H will be moving the headquarters of our Studio H high school design/build program to REALM Charter School in Berkeley, California this summer. This decision comes after months of deliberation, planning, and negotiation; please read on for the whole story of both our departure from Bertie and launch at REALM (apologies for our lengthiness: we wanted to be thorough in the

Our first cohort of Studio H students (2010-2011 school year) are officially high school graduates! After two semesters, 17 college credits, learning how to use every tool in the wood and metal shop, building a 2000 square foot farmers market for their home town, our 13 Studio H students have successfully completed their high school career and will move on to the next chapter. Some will be attending 4-year colleges, some are the first in their families to go to college, or graduate high school.

Last Thursday and Friday, we loaded the finished farmstands onto a trailer and delivered them to their final destination: the boys’ team’s “magic carpet” farmstand to downtown Lewiston, and the girls’ team’s “modular box” farmstand to Mr. Wallace Jones’ property on Highway 308. The two were designed 100% by students to be both aesthetically interesting and structurally sound, prefabricated and within the width and height requirements of a standard trailer (less than 96″ wide). ————————– BOYS TEAM: “Team Genie” We delivered the boys’ farmstand on

Last night, we attended the annual award banquet for the regional chapter of CEFPI (Council for Educational Facility Planners International). CEFPI is a great group of architects, educators, and business folk who “seek to improve the places where children learn.” I’ve known of them for years now, and last year, was one of the speakers at their annual conference. After hearing about Studio H, the chapter president offered two of our students $1000 college scholarships, though they could not be awarded until this year (now