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Classroom activity Grade 9 Art & Music

Designing a Pennock Landmark Water Tower: Grade 9 Silhouette Charrette

Grade 9 teams run a fast design charrette to shape a landmark water tower silhouette that still meets storage and pressure constraints.

Objectives

  1. Students will generate water tower silhouettes through rapid thumbnail sketching.
  2. Students will judge a form by its recognizable silhouette and its use of negative space.
  3. Students will keep a design within a storage-volume and pressure constraint.

Vocabulary

Key words: silhouette, positive space, negative space, form, design charrette, constraint

Teacher overview

Many towns are replacing aging water towers, and a new tank is a rare chance to add a landmark to the skyline that also does a demanding job. This activity runs as a design charrette, a fast and focused group design session, for teams of three or four. The activity ties art to engineering directly: the silhouette a designer draws against the sky is what people will recognize, yet the same form has to hold enough water and stand high enough to keep pressure up. Students sketch, select, and critique tank forms while a storage-volume floor and a pressure requirement keep the design honest.

Activity Directions

  1. Setup (5 min): Form teams of three or four and give each student grid paper and the constraint card. Explain that a charrette is a short, intense design session with quick sketches and frequent feedback rather than one slow drawing.
  2. Present the problem (8 min): The fictional town of Pennock wants its new elevated tank to be a landmark people recognize from a distance, while meeting two functions. The tank must hold at least 500,000 gallons, and it must stand high enough that nearby homes still receive at least 40 psi, since utilities aim to keep pressure in the 40 to 80 psi range. Discuss how a strong silhouette reads as a single clear shape even from far away.
  3. Teach the design language (8 min): Define silhouette, positive and negative space, and form. Show how classic tank shapes, such as a fluted column, a sphere on legs, or a smooth ellipsoid on a single shaft, each create a different silhouette and different negative space between the legs or under the bowl.
  4. Rapid ideation (10 min): Each student sketches at least three quick silhouette thumbnails in six minutes, filling each shape solid black so only the outline reads. Remind them a large water-holding body sitting on a tall support is what meets the volume and height constraints.
  5. Select and develop (12 min): Each team chooses one thumbnail to develop into a larger silhouette, adds a simple surface-graphic idea, and writes one sentence on how the form still holds the required volume and reaches the required height.
  6. Pin-up critique (8 min): Teams tape their designs to a wall for a pin-up. Peers give two kinds of feedback on each: how recognizable the silhouette is from across the room, and whether the form plausibly meets the storage and pressure constraints.
  7. Debrief (4 min): As a class, name the silhouette that stayed most recognizable while clearly still functional, and discuss one tradeoff a team made between a striking shape and a practical one.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Differentiation

Support

Provide a page of blank tank armatures (a tall support with an empty bowl outline) so students who find open sketching hard can vary only the tank body. Offer a short visual glossary of three classic tank silhouettes to adapt.

Extension

Ask teams to design a matching nighttime lighting scheme that keeps the silhouette recognizable after dark, and to explain how the lighting reinforces the same shape rather than fighting it.

ELL supports

Provide labeled images of silhouette, positive space, and negative space with a home-language gloss where possible. Allow the one-sentence constraint note to be a short phrase, and let students point to features on their sketch while a partner helps put the reasoning into words.

Extensions

Teams can photograph a real water tower or tall structure in their area, trace its silhouette, and evaluate how recognizable it is, then propose one change to its form or surface graphic that would make it a stronger local landmark.