ART : Children Learn New Kind of Pyramid Power at Laguna Museum : Vitruvius Program also focuses on other three-dimensional objects in a remarkable class in architectural problem-solving for children ages 5 1/2 to 12.

Molly Schneider, a petite, friendly-looking woman in a blue work shirt and white pants, holds up a small paper object. “Anyone know what this is called?,” she asks the nine children clustered on the carpet around her.

“A square?” asks one little girl uncertainly.

“A pyramid!” exclaims a serious-looking little boy.

“And what makes a form a pyramid?”

“Three sides!”

“Three corners!”

Schneider explains that pyramids also are called tetrahedrons. Opening one side of the pyramid-shaped box, she pulls out a long attached piece of paper folded into accordion-pleated triangles and sprinkled with small pieces of colorful, textured paper.

“It’s cool!” a boy shouts.

And so begins the fifth and next-to-last meeting of a remarkable class in architectural problem-solving for children ages 5 1/2 to 12 at the Laguna Art Museum. It’s part of the Vitruvius Program, devised in 1988 by Kathleen and Eugene Kupper under the auspices of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica and named after Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a 1st Century B.C. Roman architectural theoretician.

Kathleen Kupper calls the Vitruvius instructors (all of whom have backgrounds in art or architecture) “horizontal teachers, not vertical teachers. They’re down there with the students, talking about spatial relationships, talking about (the children’s) thoughts, walking through that space they’ve created, listening to their stories, and helping them structurally make the projects.

”. . . The teachers have to be energetic in a kind of calm way, talking and listening” all the time.

Schneider, 37, is an architect at LSC Studios in Costa Mesa and the mother of two. She has been teaching Vitruvius classes for nearly a year. “I’ve known Kathleen forever, and we’ve worked with kids together,” she says. “I’m completely in sync with what she does.”

Vitruvius classes frequently begin with a story that serves as inspiration for the project of the day. Today, Schneider reads from a picture book, “Papa Please Get the Moon for Me,” by Eric Carle.

The story is about a girl named Monica who sees the moon and wants her father to take it down from the sky so she can play with it. He gets a very long ladder (the book has fold-out pages showing how long the ladder is), climbs up to the moon (more fold-out pages “climb” upward) and conveys his daughter’s wish. Alas, the moon is too big to serve as a playmate. Not to worry, says the moon. Every night I get a little smaller. Finally, the moon is small enough for Monica to dance with it.

Evoking an era before video games and TV, the kids lean forward on their hands or sit cross-legged in rapt attention as Schneider reads aloud.

“The reason I like this book so much,” she tells the class, “is every time you unfold a page it relates to the action.” Her voice is gentle but her language frequently is sophisticated; there’s no dumb kiddie patter here.

“When Monica’s father puts the ladder up, which way do the pages fold out?”

“Up!” sings the class.

She shows them pop-up books of various kinds. One of them has a double page design of rectangles in primary colors. A visitor does a double-take when one child casually identifies the style of these pages as De Stijl, the early 20th-Century art and architecture movement based on rectangular forms and a restricted range of colors.

Now Schneider holds up the paper pyramid again. “We’re going to make this,” she says.

“A tarragon!”

“Yes, a tetrahedron,” Schneider says, smiling. “One thing about geometry: If you take simple forms--a circle, a square and a triangle--and make them three-dimensional, a square becomes a cube, a circle becomes a sphere, and a triangle becomes a pyramid.”

Pointing to the accordion-folded paper inside the pyramid, she says: “This is a staircase you can use when the moon is full, to climb up and play with moon. It’s a collapsible structure, no ordinary ladder. This is the most beautiful climbing construction.”

Suddenly, Schneider’s melodic voice is studded with invisible exclamation points, emphases that serve as a gateway into an imaginary realm. As Kupper says, Vitruvius teachers’ voices “carve out a space” for children. “By addressing children in this way, you immediately pull them off into that abstract, ‘I-am-going-to-make-something’ ” realm.

Deftly combining facts about geometry with fancies drawn from the story, Schneider helps to make the children’s minds receptive to designing their own projects. Unlike old-style public school art classes that either allowed free-for-all finger painting or required everyone to copy the teacher, this class is about problem-solving and using your imagination.

Vitruvius--which received a 1990 Design Arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts--involves using artists’ and architects’ tools to solve spatial problems, rather than simply learning about the existing built environment.

The unfolding-ladder-in-a-pyramid project is “about as controlled as we get,” Schneider says. “The most important thing is to allow them complete freedom within a structure. We try to get them to think in different ways and explore the different materials.”

Kathleen Kupper, who grew up in what she calls the “powerful and magical” glacier-transformed landscape of rural Wisconsin, acknowledges that her own childhood may have influenced certain features of the Vitruvius program.

“If you live in the country, there’s this pile of stuff you can use to make a world,” she says. Vitruvius “is the junk heap that every kid should have in his or her back yard.” Many of the projects have landscape, rather than urban, themes. Even the old-fashioned one-room school Kupper attended gave her unusual freedom to wander into new areas of learning: “When I was finished with my work, I could take a peek around the corner and look at older or younger students’ work.”

As a student at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she took classes in studio art with conceptual artist John Baldessari and environmental design. After graduation, she taught design concepts to children at CalArts and elsewhere for several years. While studying for her master’s degree in architecture at UCLA, she taught design in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

In 1988, Southern California Institute of Architecture director Michael Rotondi invited her to shift her base of operations to the school. In this hotbed of theoretical innovation and experimentation, Vitruvius was born. The program was “much more oriented toward teaching children to think symbolically, to engage in mythic thought in this age of skepticism,” Kupper says.

“I found that storytelling allowed the children to develop projects that were each unique and individual, to think about a particular kind of space, to learn to think abstractly and develop language skills, and also to develop their own stories.”

The skills and vocabulary taught in Vitruvius classes function as a language, Kupper explains, that help kids translate their ideas into two and three dimensions: “Quite often, after they make a model, and the memory of making it is fresh in their hands, we have children make a drawing or painting of it.”

Even children with learning disabilities have thrived in these classes, she says. These kids gain not only the ability to manipulate spatial relationships but also the self-esteem that comes from solving problems and being respected by their peers.

Not all Vitruvius projects relate specifically to works of literature. Others have to do with places, like the “floating” theater which would “dock” at various points along an imaginary Mississippi River, allowing the kids to tell stories about the history of the land and to sing regional songs.

Still other projects relate to what Kupper calls “a mythic geography”--places that exist only in the children’s imaginations. One such project involved inventing the remnants of a lost civilization and burying them. Another class had the task of digging them up and reconstructing their history.

The full range of Vitruvius classes in Santa Monica include model-making in wood, plaster, illustration board and paper. Some classes involve paper-making, book-making, furniture design, even video animation.

The Laguna Beach studios (limited to 10 children per class) are the first to be held in a museum setting, which delights Kupper because it gives kids “the idea that the museum is accessible, that you can put your work in it.”

Downstairs, in the museum’s Children’s Corner, models and prints from earlier Vitruvius classes are on view. The prints are fanciful renderings of underground and above-ground cities, inspired by a Grimm fairy tale, “The Three Feathers.” The rainbow-colored wooden models are variants on bridge forms, based on a story about a child who builds a bridge and saves the lives of people in his village.

Art “isn’t just sitting down with paintings,” Kupper emphasizes. “We can look at science, at history. I want to bring as much as possible of the world to them to discover.”

At a U-shaped arrangement of tables in the middle of a museum gallery, each child’s place has a box of crayon-like oil pastels, a glue stick, a pencil, blunt scissors, one long piece of stiff white paper and a rectangle of heavy colored paper.

Schneider tells the class to use “every sky color you can find in your box of oil pastels” on the sheet of white paper. One child draws with light strokes of blue and pink; another grinds down on the paper to make a thick spread of blue interwoven with red and yellow.

“Do we have to make the person?” a small voice inquires.

“No, you’re going to imagine the person,” Schneider answers.

Choosing from a small pile of differently textured and patterned papers--some of which were hand-made by students in other Vitruvius classes--the kids cut more-or-less ladder-like shapes and paste them down on their skies.

A quiet, tow-haired boy dapples his sky with bits of silver paper in different sizes. “They’re stars,” he tells a visitor.

Schneider suggests that “it would be very interesting if, when you unfold this, pieces pop out.” A dark-haired boy carefully cuts a precise squiggle out of a piece of lime-green paper and lets it jiggle on his sky.

Everyone traces around a cardboard pattern that will help turn the stiff colored paper into a portable house for the sky. Pressing down on T-squares, the kids painstakingly divide the paper into a series of triangular shapes. Then everybody lines up to have Schneider score the pencil lines with an X-Acto knife, so they can be easily folded into a pyramid that closes up, like a box.

“It’s magical to see that shape become a three-dimensional shape, when they fold it and feel it,” Schneider says.

Kids in the summer architecture classes--which start next month--will be working with maps and site planning. One group will design a pier for Laguna Beach, beginning by making a model on a small scale, then developing it on a larger scale. Meanwhile, students in the furniture classes will explore their design ideas with a preliminary model, and then build and paint a child-sized table and chair to take home.

Still revved up as she gathers up the materials to stash them in her car, Schneider confesses that teaching the program is so exhilarating, it’s a bit of a letdown to go back to being a practicing architect.

* A new cycle of one-week Vitruvius workshops begins at Laguna Art Museum in July. Sessions One, Three and Five (architecture) for kids ages 5 1/2 to 12 will meet July 13-17, July 27-Aug. 3, and Aug. 10-14. Sessions Two and Four (furniture making) for kids ages 7 to 12 will meet July 20-24 and Aug. 3-7. Tuition is $85 for the architecture classes; $120 for the furniture classes (includes $25 material fee).

Schneider is also offering a once-a-week “after-lunch special” series for five weeks beginning July 14. Tuesday classes are for 4- and 5-year-olds; Wednesday and Thursday classes are for 6- to 12-year-olds. All the classes meet from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Tuition is $60. Reservations are necessary. Call the education department at (714) 494-8971.