A lifeless building on Warrington Avenue became orange with green accents under James Thomas' hand. Shaquai Davis used lilac in her rendering of a dull brick building at Warrington and Allen Street.

	Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Grandview Elementary art teacher Carol Skinger shows off student artwork displayed in an Allentown store front. Click photo for larger image. Multimedia Slideshow: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

To these and Carol Skinger's other fifth-grade art students at Grandview Elementary, Allentown got a little more interesting and colorful during the semester that's just ending. Their art exhibit, "Allentown Architecture," has just "opened" -- in store fronts and inside businesses along Warrington Avenue for the next four weeks.

Yesterday, about eight fifth-graders and Ms. Skinger took a walking tour of Warrington, pausing at each store front that displayed their artwork to discuss it. During a moment of heavy rain, James Thomas, huddled in a building entrance, tried to remember where his building was. He cast his eyes about before settling on the one right across the street.

"I think it was that one," he said, pointing at a woeful example of both architecture and vitality. The windows of the two-story red-brick store front are boarded up. The roof is bowed. The storefront windows glare back bereft of color and of life.

"Why did you chose that one?" he was asked.

"Because it was abandoned. Because I see that building every day and usually I just walk past it and don't look at it, but when I finished [the artwork], I started to look at it to see if it looks better."

He said if he owned it, "I would probably fix it up and make it into something kids can enjoy."

Ms. Skinger said she grew up drawing buildings in her native Stowe, Vt., and spent 20-plus years as a space planner and interior designer. "I decided to change careers and get back in the classroom, where I briefly started before getting caught up in my design career," she said.

She devised the project to introduce her students to the architecture of the buildings they walk past every day and to find a stronger connection to their neighborhood's history. She also asked them what they would do with the buildings if they owned them and if the neighborhood became a destination.

From Grandview Elementary, the Pittsburgh skyline is spectacular, she said, "but I thought it might be more unusual to take their own [neighborhood's] main street and the facades of commercial buildings. They actually know these buildings.

"I started by shooting digital 35 photos of buildings." The images included Schwartz's Market, Michelle's Diner, the youth hostel building and an Italianate red-brick former house that's now home to Moir Computer Associates.

"Using Photoshop, I drained the color out," she said. "I wanted to introduce the idea of the Fauve, the French art movement where the main focus was using bright colors that had nothing to do with the subject, and to free them from this feeling of making realistic color choices."

She said she purposely photographed the buildings without context so the children would be faced with a blank slate emotionally, too. In the process, they have learned words such as facade, cornice, fenestration, Romanesque, brackets and cantilever.

The children used vine charcoal to outline their facades then began adding color, using sponges and cardboard stamps but not paintbrushes, said their teacher.

"I chose Michelle's Diner because my mother's middle name is Michelle," said Jasmine Mitts. "My house is that one right there," she said, pointing at a house that has a view of Michelle's.

Jean Bucaro, a clerk at Amsler Pharmacy, where several of the children's artworks hang in the front window, said, "I think it brightens up the neighborhood. The artwork is great, really good work."

Inside Alla Famiglia, chef and owner Jonathan Vlasic has hung the artwork along his oven hood. With the children inside his restaurant yesterday afternoon, he gave them applause and said, "I think we have some fine, budding artists. They're beautiful. My clients over the weekend very much enjoyed it."

Veronica Walkuski said the project "inspired me to become an architect and design buildings, and I can't wait to be one when I get older."