Building Bridges at Laurel Dell

By Architect Shirl Buss

We hope everyone is safe and recovering from the horrible fires. The disaster highlights our need to enlist this generation of students as innovative designers and activists to meet the environmental challenges we are all facing today—and in the future.

I am happy to share that we had another very fruitful session with Mr. Belmont’s class last week—while we were all hunkered down keeping safe from the smoke.

The students created Friendship Bridges.  After seeing images of bridges from around the world and studying different bridge types, the students worked in pairs. Each pair built a bridge to symbolically represent their common strengths and interests.  We also introduced the first “Y-PLAN 5Cs” badge: Collaboration.

This is a very imaginative and capable group — with each team working smoothly and together to earn that badge, while building extraordinarily creative bridges.

Thanks again Mr. B and all!

Next up for this class: Animal Architecture (introduction to sustainable building).