City Architects were delighted to work with Dublin City Public Libraries last month as part of the Open House architecture festival.

An enthusiastic group of children were first given some tips on how to analyse buildings as part of learning to draw them. After that, the children dispersed in groups around Pearse Street Library to select and draw different parts of the building. Some picked architectural decorations, window patterns or the building frontage while some preferred to draw the arrangements of books and posters they were seeing. The workshop finished up with an exercise where the children invented ‘clients’ which they then drew houses for. Houses for clowns, superheroes, monkey families and witches jostled as the children finished up by putting them together to make up their own city. The event was open to children aged 8+ and there was a good range of ages with even one or two parents joining in the sketching exercises.

For Dublin City Libraries great credit is due to Anne Marie Kelly and the staff at Pearse Street who expertly organised and set up the room and equipment and facilitated the wandering groups of sketchers in their midst. City Architects was represented by Cecilia Lopez Naughton, Gabriela Gajdova, Amalia Lopez Naughton and Owen O’Doherty.