Come design your dream home!

Step inside a design studio where you can explore what it’s like to be an architect, designer, and engineer.

Plan a dream home or a dog house, build a skyscraper model, find the best arrangement of an apartment model’s rooms and furniture, construct a structure you can crawl through, and much more in the bilingual (English and Spanish) show, created by Brooklyn Children’s Museum in association with The Center for Architecture Foundation. The exhibition introduces children to the design process, including collaborative problem-solving, planning, revisions, and execution.

Inside Building Brainstorm and you’ll find a kid-friendly studio environment inspired by the philosophy and aesthetic of mid-century designers Charles and Ray Eames.  Filled with architectural plans, photographs, models, and authentic building elements, the show features interactive workbenches and job sites that equip diminutive designers to brainstorm creative solutions for architectural and engineering challenges.  Kids will discover the basics of buildings while exploring the process of creating structures that match the needs of the people inside them.

The exhibit features several “design challenges,” where you can experiment with building materials, engineering concepts, and design decisions in an exciting and educational environment.  In the Shape Search Challenge, find basic geometric shapes in complex buildings. Try to replicate unusually shaped structures with wood blocks in the Shapes in Buildings Challenge. To experience curved, angled, and square building shapes from a different perspective, make your own crawl-through structures at the Inside Shapes Challenge.

Lighting considerations in building design become clear at the Window House Challenge, when you experiment with changeable clear, translucent, and opaque panels in a house made of windows. The Floor Plan Challenge opens up the world of spatial organization and how people use rooms.  Create the ideal floor plan for a model home by arranging the rooms and miniature furniture in just the right way for your needs.  In the Room Design Challenge, create an inspiration board for different types of rooms, using real material samples.

In the Brainstorm Challenge area, kids can work together and generate creative designs for the needs of imaginary clients—it might be to design a house for a family pet or a school for skateboarders—and then make sketches or build models of the best parts of their “building brainstorm” collaborative design process.

Throughout the exhibition, graphic panels provide information about environmentally friendly building and construction practices, and invite visitors to think about ways they can make their designs more “green.” 

“Building Brainstorm is a great encore to the opening of the new Museum,” says Liza Reich Rawson, the Museum’s senior exhibition developer and Building Brainstorm project manager, referring to the vibrant Rafael Viñoly-designed facility that opened September 20, 2008, and has welcomed more than 140,000 visitors in just months.  “Like the new Museum building, exhibits, and programs, Building Brainstorm inspires children and their grown-ups to explore the world around them, try their hand at something new, and discover ways that they can judiciously use resources and have minimal impact on the environment.” 

The exhibition was created as part of the Youth Museum Exhibit Collaborative (YMEC), a consortium of nine leading North American youth museums.  Following its debut at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the show will tour other YMEC museums in Boston, MA; Fort Worth, TX; Houston, TX; Hull, Quebec, Canada; Memphis, TN; St. Paul, MN; San Jose, CA; and Sausalito, CA before returning to New York City, where it conclude its tour at The Center for Architecture Foundation in Manhattan.

The exhibition components and related educational programs support U.S. elementary curriculum standards in mathematics, visual arts, technology, and science through hands-on activities that encourage inquiry-based exploration.

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Building Brainstorm is the second exhibition in the Museum’s Chase Gallery, our new home for visiting exhibitions, generously donated by JPMorgan Chase. The Chase Gallery will continue hosting a rotating schedule of traveling exhibitions from across North America.