MUSCAT For several hours the open Design Studio in the fifth floor of the Department of Urban Planning and Architectural Design at GUtech turned into a class-room for school-children of grade 4 of the American British Academy (ABA) last week .
Four students of the Urban Planning and Architectural Design Department explained their work to the children and built small urban models with them. Hamda Al Hajri was one of the GUtech students, for her and the others this was the first time to explain their work to children. Hamda has built a model of a house in Medinat Qaboos. "At the beginning, I had to take the measurements of the building and then design the house and cut the material, I used carton" she told the students. "It's fun to feel that you are an expert for some time while explaining my project to the children. It makes me feel proud of my work," said Hamda.
"I find it very interesting. This helps us learning at school. When we see the models, we learn about cities," said Divine. In the future the 10 year old girl would like to be an artist and design cities. Divine grew-up in Nigeria and has been living with her family in Muscat for a while. "I like Muscat, there is a lot of greenery (????) and a lot of fun. There are many play-grounds and parcs," said Divine.
Aysha Farooq, 3rd year student at GUtech explained that materials such as sponges, styrofoam, clay, newspapers and stretchable fabrics are used for building models. Before designing a model you always have to ask yourself: "What do I want to create and what do I want to show? You may see something but you imagine something else" said Aysha .
To create awareness about our cities and about the importance of urban planning, GUtech's department of Urban Planning and Architecture offers these sessions to school-children. "We always want to reach out to the society, there are many possibilities how to do that, these open classroom sessions is one of them. Said Nikolaus Knebel, Head of Department and Associate Professor Urbanism is a topic that affects everybody and therefore it is important to discuss that not only with experts. The city is not only a sum of buildings but it is about the relation between infrastructure, commerce and trade, transportation, houses, people, and many more aspects. For our students it is great to explain this complex topic to people from outside of their profession."
At the end of the session, nine year-old Huriya was very impressed of the different architectural and urban planning models. She realized after the session: "To attract a lot of people you have to be very creative when you design a city."
GUtech offers a four-year full-time BSc programme in Urban Planning and Architectural Design and a three years part-time MSc programme in Integrated Urban Planning. The language of instruction at GUtech is English.
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© Press Release 2011
