When I was a child, summer camps were for swimming and other sports and weaving baskets or key chains, and learning songs. I never went to a camp like that, but at 16 I became a junior counselor at a day camp near my home in the Riverdale section of New York City. I worked with the senior counselor who must have been 18 or 19 to supervise a group of 10 children 11 and 12 years old.
Today many years later I’m again a counselor, this time no longer junior, at a day camp in Miami. However, it’s nothing like the camp I knew. Now summer day camps focus on a particular subject that the children will study. There are IT camps, nature camps, history camps, drama camps, film camps, and so on.
I’m working at the two-week summer day camp of the Miami chapter of the American Institute of Architects, started eight years ago by Rick Ruiz, a retired architect who wanted to give back to the community by equipping children with basic principles of architecture.
The camp takes place five days a week at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Children – ages 8-14 and divided into three studios – use the same labs where university students take courses and work on projects that eventually earn them a bachelor’s degree in architecture.
Some of this year’s group of 95 campers participated in previous years. The youngest children start in Studio 1, go on to Studio 2 the next year, and finally Studio 3. If they’re old enough, they can start in Studio 2 or 3. In each studio, they learn some architectural history and draw their versions of famous buildings, from the front, side, and cross-section.
Each week the campers take a field trip to experience examples of local architecture. The field trip that I organized provided a rare opportunity to see a museum being constructed as well as visit that same museum currently operating in a much smaller space.
Several years ago Miami Dade County and private organizations partnered to plan an art museum and a science museum downtown on Biscayne Bay. The Perez Art Museum of Miami opened in last December. The new Science Museum will open in early 2016.
Right now everyone can watch the building going up. So the young campers learning about architecture heard Dr. Eldredge Bermingham, Chief Science Officer of the Science Museum, describe the new museum and its four parts including a planetarium and an aquarium with an open roof exposed to the elements as they sat on the plaza in front of the Perez Art Museum.
To make the new building more sustainable, the open area will allow visitors to look down into the aquarium as if they were riding in a boat. On lower floors they will see into the aquarium from the side at the same level as fishes and other sea creatures.
After about an hour listening to Dr. Bermingham describe the opportunities for learning about the cosmos, the seas, the coral reef, and the River of Grass – the Everglades national park that provides Miami’s drinking water – the campers took a bus to the current science museum for lunch and a tour of the facility.
The bus returned to the construction site later with another group of campers who began the day at the current museum and heard from Dr. Bermingham who was kind enough to give the same talk twice.
By Alma Kadragic
