Architecture Centres can deliver a spaceshaper workshop for you. Find out about our latest activity
Greville Smyth Spaceshaper
On a leafy day in October the Architecture Centre in Bristol ran a Spaceshaper 9-14 workshop with local school children. We were looking at Greville Smyth Park in Ashton Gate.
We met at the Tobacco Factory Theatre near to the park. Here we welcomed and introduced everybody and began the day with an ice breaker bingo game. We also thought about and discussed what makes a ‘good’ space and ‘bad’ space.
Next we split into small groups and walked together to Greville Smyth Park to run a site inspection. As we explored the park, we took photos of things that we liked or disliked and used site maps to highlight good and bad points. The students liked the play equipment and the plants and trees, but they didn’t like the holes in the pathways or the broken benches.
Once everyone had inspected the site and discussed the positives and negatives, we re-grouped to vote on three themes.
Is this space clean and well maintained?
Is this space easy to get around?
Is this space safe and comfortable in all weathers, during the day and the night?
The young people had to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with these questions and the voting was counted.
Having returned to the Tobacco Factory Theatre we felt we had earned a break so we sat down for some drinks and biscuits to get ready for our next carousel of activities.
Activity spotter helped us identify what people can do in the space. The students used sticky strips to show what activities they take part in at the park.
The students looked at pictures of similar spaces and arranged the images from best to worst giving their reasons why, in order to Rate this Space. They then compared Greville Smyth Park, this helped us to assess how well designed and made the space is.
Each student chose a picture card and then used a role play game to suggest who their character may be and what they may think of the park. The rest of the group have to guess Who am I? This helped us to think about all the needs of different people who use the space.
Using the same picture cards we decided how important the park might be to each character. This helped us to Think of Others and assess how important the space is to the local community.
Students drew their own pictures of the park and wrote a post card to a friend to say I wish you were…I wish you weren’t here and described why. This helped us to decide whether it is a really nice place to be.
After each task the young people were asked to vote on a question that related to the activity. By lunchtime all the voting was complete and we just needed to tally up all the scores.
After a lovely lunch of pizza, sandwiches, fresh vegetables and fruit we gathered together to look at the results. We displayed the findings on a fun chart called a ramblegram.
This showed us the results for each voting theme in an interesting and visual format. We also looked at some spider diagrams of the results and discussed our findings with the young people and the Friends of Greville Smyth Park.
The students had lots of ideas about how they would like to improve Greville Smyth Park so we spent the rest of the afternoon drawing pictures of new features and adding them onto the site maps.
At the end of the session we thanked everybody for taking part and presented the students with Spaceshaper 9-14 certificates.
