See It • Build It • Know It
See It • Build It • Know It
Over the past 30 years, the Salvadori Center has created a body of curriculum materials that has enabled hundreds of teachers and thousands of students to master the core subject areas as well as have a great deal of fun along the way.
The Salvadori curriculum aims to gives teachers and students the tools to turn the abstract into the concrete through a range of activities, projects, and practices all solidly grounded in the principles of project-based learning.
In this section, you will be able to click through interactive teaching units, view video and animation, download lesson plans and student handouts, and adapt these lessons for your classroom.
Alert: KidsBridges and The Art of Construction will open in new windows.
Lessons from the Salvadori Classrooms, developed over two decades, integrate architecture and engineering into the core subject areas of the curriculum: science, social studies, language arts, visual arts, and mathematics. Visitors can a obtain log-in key that allows them access to the sixty lessons available on the site.
Investigate the Brooklyn Bridge--or a landmark near you--and use it as a tool to teach math or science, art or the humanities. See student-devised problems solved, on-site and in the classroom. Read students' journals from the project, then download materials as a guide to do it yourself.
Follow along as two teachers and their students spend a semester learning about the forces that act upon bridges. Watch them testing paper columns and homemade concrete beams. Includes lesson plans and assessment rubrics, along with video interviews with the math and science teachers who developed and implemented the curriculum.
Discover our complement and extension of The Art of Construction, making the book a more powerful teaching and learning tool for use in middle school and literacy courses. Click through the units to explore how the built environment influenced - and was influenced by - historical and technological developments.
Our founder, Mario Salvadori, a world-renowned structural engineer, believed that the built environment held all the knowledge that a person needed to be an intelligent and active member of the community. What teachers need to make this knowledge available to their students are tools with which they can "unpack" the knowledge embedded in the built environment.
The Salvadori Center gives these tools to teachers and students through a pedagogy grounded in what it calls "project-based, hands-on/minds-on activities" that employ the principles of architecture, engineering, and the design process. Through this method, teachers and their students can unlock the math, science, art, and humanities embodied in the structures and systems that surround them.