SAH’s American Architecture and Landscape Field Trip Program Makes a Grant to I-NOMA

In July 2016 SAH awarded the Illinois Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (I-NOMA) a $5,000 grant to support their Project Pipeline Architecture Summer Camp for Chicagoland students in the sixth through eighth grades. The mission of the annual camp is “to empower young people to affect change in their community through design.”  Using the city of Chicago as a classroom, I-NOMA matches architects and planners with students and hopes to foster a new generation of design professionals, civic leaders, and well-informed citizens. Those students will be the future decision makers who will be better informed about the history and practice of design and will bring that knowledge to bear on the future of their homes, neighborhoods, and cities.  

A team of eight architects, led by I-NOMA Vice President Oswaldo Ortega, managed dozens of architect volunteers who worked with the students on mathematical, historical, and planning concepts. More than 40 students met for the four-day camp in the historic Ida Noyes Hall at University of Chicago to learn about personal space, neighborhood space, and the vertical city. In addition to learning how to measure, sketch, and plan buildings and neighborhoods, the students toured Collegiate Gothic, Prairie School, and Modern and Contemporary buildings on the campus. In-depth field trips organized for them included Robie House (1908-10), Frank Lloyd Wright’s first full realization of the Prairie School House, and Helmut Jahn’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library (2011), a soaring elliptical glass dome reading room with state-of-the-art features for the speedy retrieval of 3.5 million scholarly volumes, as well as outdoor quadrangles and lushly landscaped gardens. In order to introduce the students and mentors to SAH’s resources, we also provided information about SAH’s mission and its resources including free tours of Charnley-Persky House and free universal access to SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings, our online encyclopedia of American architecture.  

SAH’s support of I-NOMA’s summer camp has been made possible by funding that SAH received in 2014 and 2015 to create programs that provide enrichment for underserved students through architectural tours. SAH offers grants and programming for K-12 students through the SAH Architecture and Landscape Field Trip Program. If you would like to introduce SAH to a small not-for-profit organization that enriches underserved students’ lives through workshops, classes, and field trips that focus on the history of architecture and landscapes, please contact SAH Executive Director Pauline Saliga at psaliga@sah.org.