Urban Studies Committee - TrustNews Summer 1994
The Urban Studies Committee have continued to concentrate on the Chippindale Venture and the photographic study of Winchester. The Chippindale Venture is now in its fifth year. On 30th June 1994, all the students - more than 200 in number - from Year 11 (14 years) at the Henry Beaufort School, Winchester took part in a Chippindale Workshop and assumed that their school was to close and that a new use for the campus was needed. They were able to use all the existing buildings, demolish some and retain others, or clear the site and start afresh. It was assumed that sufficient funding was available for any reasonable scheme.
Preparatory work with site analysis and a short exercise to design a new performing arts centre had been undertaken. The pupils were assisted by local planners, architects and landscape architects from the Winchester area and by undergraduate students. The morning was spent preparing proposals for the site, and in the afternoon, these were presented by the pupils, first to "planning committees"; drawn from among their own number, with a select few being assessed by an outside panel of planners and other professionals.
The Chippindale Venture aims to foster an increased awareness of the manmade environment and the forces which shape it, by hands-on work in the classroom with non-teaching adults. Amongst the benefits will be the breaking down of traditional barriers between design professionals and teachers, and the stimulus to students of group working on a complex and challenging cross-curricular project. The Venture relies on the voluntary contribution of professional time by designers and their firms or local authorities. There was an opportunity to discuss with participants during the day, whether this was the most effective way of using professionals' time in the classroom, whether the students can rise to the challenge and the suitability of the project within the National Curriculum timetable.