Little "Architects" Help A&T Students Plan Landscape for Children's Museum

October 30, 1998

Greensboro, NC: Finger paintings, collages and construction paper structures serve as a basis upon which students in the Landscape Architecture Program at North Carolina A&T State University will plan the landscape for the new Children's Museum in Greensboro.

"Too often, people are constrained by cultural assumptions and limits in budget and space," said Peter Callahan, an assistant professor of landscape architecture in A&T's School of Agriculture. "Children are free from those constraints, and using their ideas forces our students to think outside of constraints when planning the landscape for this important addition to Greensboro."

To get the ideas of two-, three- and four-year-olds at College Hill Cooperative Day Care, seniors in Callahan's Advanced Landscape Architectural Design class spent a morning helping them create visual interpretations of a garden.

The two-year-olds represented their ideas through finger painting, while the three-year-olds did the same with collages, and four-year-olds with construction paper landscapes.

All of this artwork is now in A&T's Carver Hall, where Callahan's students must transform the ideas into a plan for the Children's Museum garden, which is located on North Church Street, and is slated to open in May 1999.

"Landscape architects must be able to open up to someone else's world and agenda," said Callahan. "This exercise will help our students focus on the importance of maintaining creativity in spite of inherent restraints, when devising their plans."

The A&T student plans resulting from the interpretation of the children's artwork will serve as the basis for a restructured landscape surrounding the new Children's Museum.

The A&T Landscape Architecture Program, initially accredited in 1993, is the only program accredited by the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board at a historically black college or university, and it is the only accredited undergraduate
program in North Carolina. These recognitions have made the program a model for others in a field in which minorities are underrepresented.

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For more information, please call Peter Callahan, NC A&T School of Agriculture, (336) 334-7520.