Hey!yard is an educational project involving initiatives and small scale projects designed and built by architecture secondary school students.
National
Romania
Transylvania
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual
First name: Anamaria Last name: Felvinczi Gender: Female Nationality: Romania Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Str. Cutezantei No.27 Town: Targu-Mures Postal code: 540490 Country: Romania Direct Tel:+40 756 598 551 E-mail:ana.felvinczi@gmail.com
Hey!yard was initiated by architect Ana Felvinczi when she was invited to teach architecture classes for highschool students in the Vocational Arts College in Târgu-Mureș, a small town located in the center of Transylvania.
Romania is one of the few European countries where architecture is still taught in specialized architecture classes in vocational highschools, but the curriculum is left to the choice of the teachers and is almost entirely concentrated on theoretical subject matters that remain mostly unchanged since the socialist regime of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. That was a period when architecture classes were taught in highschool for future technical drawing specialists, a craft almost gone nowadays and absorbed in the multiple and complex tasks of architects.
Coming from the field of practicing architects, Ana Felvinczi wanted to change this paradigm and develop a new curriculum which incorporates a diverse set of competencies, a program adapted to the current requirements regarding the academic and emotional development of students, the development of skills, critical thinking, motivation and involvement in the local community with the aim of creating for each student a strong internal reference system as a basis for further development.
Since 2017, the hey!yard project has had a series of initiatives and built interventions as follows:
the students designed and then built new urban furniture for the school yard, adapted to the needs of all students; they applied to a local fund and won a 3D printer for the school laboratory; they pedestrianized a street in front of a neighboring highschool, to encourage cycling and reduce the traffic and danger other students faced when entering the school; they saved an endangered tree whose heavy branches were supported by improvised metal structures and built with recovered wood; they studied street design with a disabled person and worked in an architecture camp with hungarian minority students.
architecture-education
craftsmanship
community
sustainability
inclusivity
All the built interventions in the hey!yard project focus on sustainability in regards to building materials longevity of the final product along with craftsmanship and learning crafts from specialists in different fields related to architecture, planning and construction. The way we use building materials, their sustainability and carbon footprint is one of the first talks students have with craftsmen and architects in the design phase of each built project.
We have developed a working relationship with the local Dalin furniture factory and also design our interventions adapted to the dimensions of scrap wood resulting in the processes of the factory.
This wood is donated to hey!yard and used for structural elements or planking.
We also reuse building materials found in situ, such was the case of the 2021 intervention in the dendrological park of Teleki Castle where the students saved an endangered tree by replacing a metal support system for the branches with wooden poles from a local tree nursery and reused the wooden elements of a dismantled playground for the structure of a semicircular bench located near the tree.
In 2022 during our joint summer camp with hungarian minority students from a neighboring arts college, the students built a community kitchen for a music festival with recovered bricks from a nearby demolished building.
We place emphasis on the life of our built projects, students learn about life cycles of built elements, how to take care of them, repair them and then hand them over for care to future generations of students involved in the project or the community.
Each hey!yard built project is made up of a design phase and a building phase, both of which concentrate on certain goals regarding the competencies we aim to develop.
The design phase is structured in a way that allows students to be part of the process of building the general theme and then gather all the necessary information about the needs of all the participants and future users of the project. Then under careful coordination from the teacher/architect they must develop an idea, a concept or an answer to the theme that achieves functional viability, quality of experience for people and aesthetic harmony.
For example, during the 2017 project of building outdoor furniture for the school yard the students had to interact with fellow students and compile a list of their needs in the schoolyard during breaks and for outdoor classes.
The final design was chosen out of a series of sketches and models that addressed rules of aesthetics taught in theoretical classes aligned with the functional needs identified in the previous talks.
The built part of the project focused on the contact and understanding of the building materials(mostly wood) and the way the material must be handled and put into shape by using its intrinsic value and characteristics for achieving beauty in ensemble but also in details.
Inclusivity became a focus for our projects once we started understanding the diverse makeup of the people who would use our built projects and with whom students should interact for a better understanding of their community and on a larger scale, of society.
Having this in mind the school, through the hey!yard project, decided to develop a partnership with the local association that gives assistance to people with disabilities, called HIFA-RO (Hilfe fur Alle=Help for Others).
We started a series of meetings with our local HIFA guide to talk with students outdoors, in the city, about inclusive design of streets, buildings and urban furniture. It was an eye opening experience that later translated in the way they approach the theme of a project, its design phase and the way they could generate a sense of place for diverse categories of users.
We also turned our attention towards ethnic diversity in our region as Transylvania has always been a melting pot for different cultures such as hungarians, saxons, jews and roma.
Our city, Târgu-Mureș has a diverse ethnic makeup of 49% romanians, 43% hungarians and 8% roma, saxon, jewish or other ethnicities, which results in many schools having both romanian and hungarian teaching classes.
Since 2022 we befriended a college from a neighboring county where minority students speak mostly hungarian and we organize joint summer camps where students design and build together getting to know each other's cultures and learning to create together for a common goal by surpassing age, language or personality differences.
Hey!yard started small with projects concentrating in and around the school, affecting mainly the lives of the school’s students, teachers and parents.
Once we started our partnership with the Mures Community Foundation in 2018 and HIFA-RO(local foundation for social actions and helping the disabled) in 2022, our projects started to branch out involving and affecting the lives of many other citizens of the city and region.
In 2018, for the Critical Mass event held in september, which encourages people to cycle more in the city, the students successfully managed to temporary pedestrianize a street in front of the entrance of a neighboring highschool and after that, they built modular outdoor furniture for the students to sit in groups and/or play while waiting for their parents.
The initiative involved students, parents and teachers from the other highschool and also the local authorities with which the hey!yard students held meetings to formally and legally manage to pedestrianize the street for a month.
The event was so successful that students from Reghin, another city in the region, decided to copy it and managed to pedestrianize their school street in the same way and build the same modular outdoor furniture using our open-source design.
In 2022, hey!yard students with the help of local cycling enthusiasts, applied in the Participatory Budgeting Competition organized by the local municipality with a project aimed to transform the surroundings of another school in the city with solutions that involve larger sidewalks for children, Kiss&Ride lanes for parents and safer crosswalks for disabled people, cyclists and pedestrians. The students publicly presented their project and managed to gather enough votes for the project to enter the final list of projects which will be implemented by the municipality.
The goal of the project for the students was to work in multidisciplinary teams and to learn that each citizen can make a change at local level.
The main goal of the project from the start was to develop a more diverse educational program for architecture secondary school students by broadening the mainly theoretical approach from the old curriculum with activities that align to the present European educational goals focused on specific competencies.
This diverse range of activities (from students meeting and participating in presentations held by influential people in different fields related to the profession, to them designing and building urban furniture for the needs of other students/communities or even being involved in decision making at local level to improve the city ) was created so that the students understand the importance of collaborating with others for reaching your goals and the importance of initiating change were there is place for improvement.
At the local level the main stakeholders engaged were the Community Foundation, HIFA-RO(Help for Others), the administrations of other schools for which our students proposed different projects and the local municipality.
On a regional level we started a partnership with Nagy Istvan Arts College located in another county so that our students can have joint activities and cultural exchanges with other architecture students. This is how hey!yard became part of their Architecture Summer Camp with students participating from both schools, some speaking romanian, others hungarian.
We have also started a collaboration with the Archaeus Foundation which organizes the SkyHill Architecture Camp for architecture students from different universities from Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. Each year the Archaeus Foundation pays the tuition for two secondary school students to attend the SkyHill camp and learn with/from local craftsmen, established architects and university students.
Architecture is a complex profession with a wide range of specialized knowledge needed for good design and implementation. The competencies taken into account at university level are numerous and vary from communication competencies, to science and technology, social-civic and learning competencies but also cultural and digital ones.
At secondary school level, where the hey!yard project is developed, these competencies are treated at a basic level with the activities focused on gradually building up for the students a set of abilities that intertwine with the theoretical knowledge learned in other clases.
They learn how they should design in a specific context taking into account the history of a place, vicinity, climate, the social makeup and other factors.
They learn how to think and design for others, the differences we all have, the challenges of people with disabilities, but also about cultural differences that shape the way people use space.
They get to know and use building materials, learn about their history, physical characteristics, the way they are best utilized and how they influence the sustainability of a built object.
They are encouraged to express themselves, to be proactive, promote the work they do and to interact with the local authority where needed.
All of these activities take place with guidance from the project coordinator and other professionals involved according to the specificities of each project: other teachers, fellow practicing architects, furniture designers, people with disabilities, manufacturers, municipal employees, activists, etc.
These multidisciplinary processes make up the core of the hey!yard project as they help students understand how to approach the different challenges of a project and the importance of collaborating with people from other professions.
Hey!yard is an unique initiative in the field of middle school specialized architecture pedagogy. The architecture classes that are found in thirty-two vocational colleges throughout the country focus only on theoretical subject matters learned in class and rarely/almost never touch on problems that have immediate impact in the community or on applied exercises at the 1:1 scale.
To this day we only know of the repetitive summer camp organized by Nagy Istvan Arts College in Miercurea Ciuc, and since 2021we started a partnership with them for the hey!yard project to be a part of this camp as a cultural exchange program.
This type of experiential learning, by doing and by being involved, is also missing at university level in Romania. The only initiatives where architecture students learn about the built environment by designing and building are usually organized by private citizens/university teachers and take place during summer camps.
So in this regard hey!yard, with its citizenship initiatives and built projects that are directly linked to the classes learned in school but also to the needs of the local community is a different approach that strives to become an exemple for the other schools in regards of practice and experimentation beyond the theoretical part of the field.
We think of our project as a common good, a way for all highschoolers to learn about the world, society and their importance as future change makers. As the project evolved and more people became collaborators or partners we realized that the best way to move forward would be to make our initiative known for all architecture secondary schools in the country and to share our experience with them.
For the last two years, as a result of the hey!yard project’s experiences, architect Ana Felvinczi, the founder of hey!yard together with architect Marius Miclăuș, founder of Archaeus Foundation(applied learning programs for architecture university students) have launched Arhitec’tool, a program focused on creating a joint curriculum for all architecture highschools, a national network of teachers that teach in these highschools and also a national network of the architecture students.
All these will be available in 2023 on an online platform containing a curriculum for the teachers built up on the premises of applied competencies, vocational and career personality tests for the students and a section dedicated to good practice with examples of exercises and exemplary works from all the schools.
Arhitec’tool began as a series of meetings with government officials and teachers from vocational colleges and architecture universities through Romania, with the aim of gathering valuable information regarding the architecture education in the country and its results.
The conclusions of these meetings materialized in a proposal of a frame plan of subject matters and courses from which the curriculum was later built. The frame plan was selected by the Ministry of Education as part of the new Education Laws being voted this spring in the country’s parliament.
In conclusion, we are confident that the methodology and learnings of hey!yard projects will be replicated in all of the thirty-two vocational highschools in our country as part of the new curriculum.
We approach each project with a combination of tools used in pedagogy and in the work experience of practicing architects.
At the beginning of the school year the teacher chooses a problem that must be tackled and presents it to the students with references to similar problems and examples of them being solved. Then the students are guided to best describe the problem and build up the theme of the project.
This project theme is then divided in chapters that are resolved in groups of two students: the analysis of the site, gathering of information and references, talks with beneficiaries, inventory of materials that can be used, building up the idea that generates the solutions and then sketching different solutions. The solutions are studied in cardboard models along with hand drawings and presented in front of the group. In a democratic manner with guidance from the teachers and invited guests the group chooses the best proposal to be implemented. In certain instances when funding is scarce the students wil set up a fundraising campaign. This part of the project is also included in the competencies chapter as students are encouraged to build up a financial proposal, to work on the video presentation and promote their work online on social platforms or local media outlets.
The design process of the project takes place during the weekly architecture workshop and the implementing/construction part takes place in supervised workshops held during the spring or summer holiday.
These projects take place in the eleventh grade, one year prior to finishing secondary school so that they don’t interfere with the national baccalaureate. In the twelve grade students are mostly focused on citizenship initiatives that are incorporated in the diploma work that they present at the end of the school year.
After the national baccalaureate the students take part in the summer architecture camp in the cultural exchange program with students from the Nagy Istvan Arts college.
Our initiative is focused on enriching the way architecture and activism is taught and experienced in highschools through building active groups of students with a common goal of being useful and producing change in their communities.
On a larger level it is about changing the way students are viewed in the education system, changing the narrative and giving them power to consciously be involved in certain processes, decision making and applied projects. We aim to make them a part of the community in which they live, to build communities with common goals and also to learn crafts/ techniques and to acquire knowledge from experienced professionals that are invited by the project coordinator.
The world needs more proactive young people with strong analytical capabilities, critical understanding, a good general knowledge and the capacity to practically apply the knowledge they acquire.
Therefore, the direction we develop in the hey!yard project is to educate a young person capable of analyzing and understanding critically and synthetically the world around him, to be creative and free in the solutions he will develop, to work together and through others, to understand the responsibility of the role he assumes, adaptable and able to resettle in alternative professional directions, but leaving with an extremely stable base of general interdisciplinary knowledge and general culture in the world of arts.
The project is constantly evolving, the changes we see in different generations of students and the problems our world has faced since the onset of the initiative in 2017 makes us approach each year as a laboratory for experimentation that follows the guidelines of our methodology.
Since 2017, the hey!yard project has had a series of initiatives and built interventions as follows:
the students designed and then built new urban furniture for the school yard, adapted to the needs of other 300 fellow students; they applied to a local fund, won a 3D printer for the school laboratory and learned how to use technology to create accurate models for their projects; they pedestrianized a street in front of a neighboring highschool, to encourage cycling and reduce the traffic and danger other students faced when entering the school; they saved an endangered tree whose heavy branches were supported by improvised metal structures and built a resting place for tourists with wood recovered from a disassembled playground; they studied inclusive street design with a disabled person and worked in an architecture camp with hungarian minority students getting to know each other's cultures and learning to create together for a common goal by surpassing age, language or personality differences .
This year the project will focus on two main goals.The first goal will be organizing a new summer camp with our partners from Nagy Istvan summer school where students will learn from local carpenters how to build with wood using traditional carpentry joints. The theme of the camp will be to build wooden structures for local shepherds in the Uzun Valley.
The second goal is concentrated on a larger scale. Architect Ana Felvinczi, coordinator of the project, will continue the Arhitec’tool project by organizing a national camp for architecture teachers where the national curriculum that has its starting point in the hey!yard project will be finalized by teachers in a joint workshop.
All the built interventions in the hey!yard project focus on sustainability in regards to building materials longevity of the final product along with craftsmanship and learning crafts from specialists in different fields related to architecture, planning and construction. The way we use building materials, their sustainability and carbon footprint is one of the first talks students have with craftsmen and architects in the design phase of each built project.
We have developed a working relationship with the local Dalin furniture factory and also design our interventions adapted to the dimensions of scrap wood resulting in the processes of the factory. This wood is donated to hey!yard and used for structural elements or planking.
We also reuse building materials found in situ and try to recover as much as possible from dismantled constructions or disassembled objects near our building sites.
During our workshops and camps students are educated to have a conscious approach to the way they behave and consume, from the food we eat that is cooked by parents or locals, to recycling all packaging, eliminating single use packaging and the careful use of water resources and electricity.
