Budding child architects will have a chance to try their hand at this creative profession in a new multimedia exhibit entitled, "My House, Your House", opening at the Memphis Childrens Museum on September 20, 1997. The interactive exhibit will help children learn how architects design a house, as well as some of the real-world issues they face everyday.

"Two concepts I want to get across are that more and more architects work with computers," explains Pat Purnell, Director of Education and Exhibits of the Memphis Childrens Museum, "and, people design a house around the needs and lifestyle of the family that will live in it. We want the kids to practice problem solving and spatial relations skills while having fun at the same time. Were also hoping to generate interaction between parent and child."

To create the multimedia portion of the exhibit, the museum turned to Paradigm Productions (Memphis, Tennessee), a group of architects with extensive backgrounds in 3D computer graphics and animation. Founded in 1992, Paradigm specializes in professional animation and visualization for architecture firms, television, video production, and computer games. The partners, Charles Gaushell and Scott Carter, call themselves architects by day and animators by night.

"We needed to design something both easy enough for children to understand and use and realistic enough to give them a sense of what architects see and do on a daily basis," says Gaushell. "Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a core tool that most architects use today. We constructed realistic 2D floor plans and 3D models of sample house plans that look like the CAD models architects create, combined with a simple, uncluttered interface with realistic effects and animations to keep the kids interested."

"Each program we used on this project played a specific role and worked seamlessly together," adds Carter. "DataCAD (DATACAD LLC, Avon, CT) was used to generate all of the floor plans for the CAD Design Module and the Exterior Design Module. Lightwave 3D (Newtek, Inc., San Antonio, TX) and Imagine (Impulse, Inc., Brooklyn Park, MN) were used to do the photorealistic textures, 3D graphics, and animations, while Macromedia Director Version 6 (Macromedia, Incorporated, San Francisco, CA) was used to tie it all together into a multimedia program that the kids could use."

Children ages 5 and up work with a virtual couple to design an ideal home. The young architects choose a series of lifestyle questions to ask the couple (e.g., Do you like to cook? Do you entertain often?) and the computer calls up a base floor plan from one of 25-30 pre-programmed options in its memory. From there, the clients disappear leaving children the opportunity to modify the design.

The exhibit allows visitors to work creatively with both the exterior and interior of the house and to explore the concept of how space works. For instance, adding a fireplace may require the elimination of a window to make room. They can select from different types of brick or stucco, choose a color, a roof style and even address basic landscaping issues outside, along with picking furniture styles, upholstery, and wallpaper for a living room and a kids room inside. The program creates photorealistic renderings of the chosen attributes and gives children the feeling of going from a 2D floor plan to a 3D world. All told, visitors should be able to complete a design in 10-15 minutes.

"It makes sense for us to use DataCAD," says Carter. "Because it is a program designed by architects for architecture, it is both realistic and powerful yet the interface is intuitive enough for casual users to grasp easily. We are using the surface textures and room designs embedded in the software for this exhibit as well. And since we can use a DXF file and export it to the other programs we are running, we have experienced no incompatibility problems."

The computers are nestled in the midst of other hands-on activities which let children explore the workings of a house. In an area called the construction site, children crawl through an underground pipe, and use child-safe carpenter and woodworking tools to connect plumbing pipes and build wooden house with blocks.

With all of the other things to see and do as part of "Your House, My House," visitors wont be deprived of the opportunity to view an example of a finished product. The impetus for the brainstorming session that led to the development of the exhibit is "Magnolia Manor," an exquisite dollhouse donated to the museum by a collector, whose stately elegance is on display in the center of the exhibit.

Whether or not it inspires the next Frank Lloyd Wright, "Your House, My House" promises to teach visitors young and old some of the tricks of the architectural trade. And it should be fun enough that kids may not even realize they are learning. How sneaky.