Play Perch

For the Play Perch project, the school sought a collaborator with particular ambitions for high-profile design. Community service projects provide significant value to architecture education, because they expose students to the “social and psychosocial aspects of design” and “contrasting theories of aesthetics”. Students staged design reviews at the SU School of Architecture Freedom and at the Jowonio School, gathering critical input from specialists in early childhood education, community engagement and public-interest design, and offering precedents that might shape the direction of the design. Many students initially had to be convinced of the need for safety procedures on-site, but they soon began to understand the risk to their own safety, the negative example they set for children visiting the site, and the hazard to the success of this and future projects. Play Perch has continued to be recognized in academic venues, a variety of media, national design conferences, professional organizations, and published volumes; it has appeared in newspapers, magazines and online.