In 1971, filmmaker Jon Boorstin shot a short documentary about then-42-year-old Gehry’s efforts to help his younger sister, schoolteacher Doreen Nelson, test out an architecture-based curriculum on Los Angeles school children. The program took students out of Westminster Elementary School in Venice every Wednesday to build their own city. Gehry felt that unless kids learned something beyond rote skills, by sixth grade “the faucet was off and they were no longer open to ideas.”

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