In 2007, ten high school students from the New York City area participated in an intensive summer workshop at the Guggenheim Museum. The museum’s summer exhibition, the Shapes of Space, investigated the multitude of ways in which artists experience and represent space. After discussing the art on view, students in the program explored their own conceptions of space through a range of activities, from drawing to writing to digital modeling.

On this site you will find examples of the two major projects that students completed during the program. In the first project, students identified places that they remembered, writing about salient characteristics of those places. They then used SketchUp, a 3-D modeling program, to create representations of the places, emphasizing their memories rather than the actual physical space.

For the second project, students identified specific places where they often spend time. They analyzed how the physical designs of their chosen places affect the how people experience those spaces. They then created digital models in which they altered the spaces in ways that would change a visitor’s experience.

We invite you to browse through the work.

--Rachel Florman, Education Manager for New Media