Inspired by the Serpentine Pavilion, Build Your Own Pavilion invites young people aged 8-16 to consider the relationship between architecture and public space and to design the architecture for the cities they would like to live in. The campaign includes a nationwide workshop tour for 8-16 year olds, taking place in cities across the UK, and a series of online digital tools for teachers and children to use in the classroom.
Alongside the workshops for children, the Serpentine is working with partner institutions up and down the country to organise Build Your Own Pavilion TeachMeets. Inviting local teachers, informal educators, makers and architects, these informal CPD sessions will provide the information and training needed to enable participants to run independent workshops for young people, helping to widen the reach of the Build Your Own Pavilion campaign.
To support the campaign, the Serpentine have created a series of resources for teachers to use to develop workshops in the classroom. The resources include ideas for generating discussion about the problems and possibilities of future cities, and lesson plans taking children through the stages of architectural design, from research and ideation to finished model. There are also 3D CAD video tutorials and a series of videos featuring famous Pavilion architects, including Francis Kéré, Bjarke Ingels, Sou Fujimoto and Smiljan Radić. After working through the brief with students, teachers can snap and upload their Pavilion designs or 3D CAD files to the Serpentine’s online gallery to share.
Resources are available online at buildyourownpavilion.serpentinegalleries.org/teachers/