From the green

When the Design & Fabrication Lab opened in 2019, it was one room, one laser cutter, and a rule: document the failure before you fix it. Seven years later the room is booked solid from Grade 6 electives through Senior Thesis builds, and this summer it finally gets to stretch. The workshop next door is being folded in, roughly doubling the floor.

The expansion adds eight work benches, a second laser cutter (retiring the sign-up spreadsheet of grief), a textiles corner, and a ventilated finishing booth. Painted projects will no longer dry in the stairwell, to the relief of everyone who uses the stairwell.

What isn't changing: the wall. Every broken prototype with its handwritten tag (the snapped turbine blades, the leaky boot, iterations one through five of the famous rain machine) moves to the new space intact. 'The wall is the curriculum,' says arts director Sarah Chen-Aldous, who fought for its square footage before the benches were counted.

The expanded lab opens with the school year in September. Visiting families can see it on any morning tour. At the fall open houses, Grade 8 students will run the demonstrations.

Marlowe's three fall open houses are set: Saturday, September 26; Saturday, October 17; and Saturday, November 7. Each starts at 10:00 a.m. and runs about two hours. Booking ahead through the tour scheduler helps us plan coffee and name tags, but nobody is turned away at the gate.

A note on format, because ours is a little unusual. There is no auditorium presentation and no scripted route. Faculty are in their own classrooms, the labs and studios are running, and the tours are led by students, who are cheerfully unsupervised in what they choose to tell you. The head of school takes unscripted questions on the green at 11:30, weather permitting, and in Barton Hall when it doesn't.

Children are not just welcome but useful. The Lower School rooms are set up for them to try things, and how a school feels to your child at nine years old is data no brochure can give you. Come with questions and leave with mud on your shoes. The ravine trail is open, and it's the best thing we'll show you all day.