Handshouse hosted a La Forêt Model Project workshop for Norwell High School students at our studio center in Norwell.

Students joined us September 27th during their “Norwell Cares Day,” an annual event Norwell High School organizes to send groups of students to volunteer for non-profits in the local area. 

Handshouse has a been part of the Norwell Cares Day program since 2018, when Jennifer Greenberg first reached out to offer to send a group of students to help us with grounds maintenance or whatever Handshouse could use a group of teen volunteers time for. In true Handshouse fashion, we chose to engage this donation of student energy as a reciprocal opportunity. We learn-by-doing at Handshouse, so this gift of a few hours of attention with a group of willing participants is an excellent help to us in exploring new ways to share our unique hands-on learning experiences to many audiences.

This year, we invited Norwell High School students to join us in answering questions we were exploring about the La Forêt Model Project.

We are often asked to exhibit our Notre-Dame Project’s model of La Forêt for groups of participants who have little to no exposure to building and carpentry, so we have been honing our model assembly workshop to be accessible and interesting to all audiences. Given Handshouse’s mission to create hands-on learning opportunities, we like to find ways to make even our exhibitions chances to offer hands-on on learning as well. For this Norwell Cares Day, we were excited to welcome these students into the assembly process and recieve their feedback on how to make this learning process even more dynamic.

The La Forêt Model is a 1:10 scale reconstruction of the choir section of Notre-Dame de Paris’s timber roof structure. Though nearing completion, the model is a constant work in progress that we have been building and rebuilding in workshops offered to participants around the US. Currently, the model is over 17 feet long and must be broken down and put back together every time it is exhibited. The process of reassembling the 1:10 white oak structure is a bigger job than it would seem, yet at the same time an excellent opportunity for participants to get inside the architecture of Notre-Dame de Paris hands-on.

The Norwell High School students were eager to engage with the complex mortise and tenon joinery of the trusses of Notre-Dame’s intricate timber roof structure. Some of the students even took initiative to work independently, through trial and error, on parts of the process with their peers. Others helped Notre-Dame Project leaders practice possible small group demonstrations and troubleshoot ways to have groups of various sizes and experiences explore the distinct structure of each the unique primary trusses. We were given the chance to practice offering the workshop with participants who might not have experience working with the processes or materials, or who were only able to work together for a short period of time. This is incredibly valuable to Handshouse, and in the process, a group of young people got to experience a way of thinking with their bodies and interacting with forms in space that they do not get to experience every day.

The workshop proved to be an astonishing success! In addition to completely assembling the model much more quickly than anticipated, we all had an opportunity to participate in meaningful hands-on experiences with this history and walk away from the day having learned something new.