The Brooklyn Art Gallery is a stunning piece of architecture, its grounds beautifully landscaped and its walls adorned with the artwork of students at the Brooklyn School for Career Development in Prospect Heights. You can’t enter the gallery — but you can lift the roof: It’s a small-scale model, the handiwork of Yvon Milien’s architecture class at the District 75 school. Everything is designed and constructed by his students, from the landscape to the building to the miniature artwork inside.

Ashawn, age 18, explains how he helped put it together. “I looked up museums on the computer, and I came up with ideas inspired from architecture magazines,” he says. “After I did research, I drew a floor plan on graph paper, and I used tracing paper to draw elevations. Then I took pictures of student artwork and had those reduced.”

Milien shows the students how to draw a floor plan and then helps them build a model using math and geometry. “We use foam board, glue, rulers and drawing or graphic papers,” he says. “All the materials architects use, we use.”

The class provides an engaging and interdisciplinary way for these special-needs students between the ages of 13 and 21 to learn about math, writing, art, the environment and social studies.

“They begin to observe and understand the structures that are all around them,” says Chapter Leader Albert Justiniano. “And they’re creating with their own hands.”

Elaine Berry, the class paraprofessional, says students hesitate at first when considering the class.

“First they say, ‘I can’t do it,’” Berry says. “I tell them, ‘Can you draw a straight line? Then you are a candidate for the class.’ So many of them have ideas but don’t know how to put them on paper.”

She helps students view the world around them with new eyes. “I tell them to look around at the shapes and angles in their bedroom or the straight lines on the street,” Berry says. “They begin to expand their vocabulary with words like ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical.’”

It’s not unusual for the class to visit a park in the neighborhood and then be tasked with recreating the landscape in a small-scale model.

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Gary Schoichet

Image

Gary Schoichet

Student progress is visible in the room. Early attempts, such as small houses, are placed on shelves around the room; sketches of different shapes are taped to the wall; and floor plans sit atop desks. In the center of the room are the buildings that demonstrate the students’ growing mastery: a park, a sustainable high school and a glittering, mixed-use building based on a Dubai skyscraper with a hotel, offices and stores.

Sidest, age 16, explains the model of a neighborhood park. “I drew the landscaping first, and I had to use measurements and a lot of rulers,” he says. “There was a lot of teamwork on this project. The class is about helping each other and working together.”

Brandon, age 16, takes pride in showing the sustainable high school, which was envisioned with solar panels, a small farm and a greenhouse. “There’s a generator for when the solar panels go dark at night,” he explains.

Principal Yvrose Pierre said she was inspired to bring the program to her school eight years ago after visiting the architecture program at nearby Brooklyn Tech HS. Each year, Milien selects eight students who he believes will be able to commit to the work. The small class keeps everyone focused and enables the students to work closely with their teacher and each other.

Students who have taken the class have created everything from a dollhouse for a sister to a model that one family wanted to use to build a house in Puerto Rico, says Berry.

Milien says the interdisciplinary nature of the course helps the students understand that complex projects draw on knowledge of a variety of subjects — and that it takes time and perseverance to create complex things.

“I had to explain it’s a process, and you can’t do the model in one day,” he says. “At lunch time, they’d come to me and say they want to finish the project.”

The program has paid many dividends for these students.

“It’s the camaraderie and the teamwork and the patience,” Berry says. “They take pride in their work and at the end, they say, ‘We did it.’”