Masters Campus Plan - Art Studio

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Masters Art Studio
to open September 2011

notes on Schematc design and the learning of art

In many schools, art is a marginal subject treaded more or less as an extracurricular activity to be abandoned when the budget gets tight. In the better schools, art is emphasized and done well. Myself, I think Art should be at the center of the entire learning process. Give me a room like illustrated here and I will facilitate the learning of the entire 21st Century Curriculum while fostering the emergence of independent life-long learners fit for the century they live in. This environment, in the traditional way of looking at it, does not “support” art “learning” - it is what is learned. “Everything speaks.” The environment is container, tool, example and symbol of a kind of life to be designed and lived.

integration of no-thing and thing...

If you ever “had” (a curious way of putting it) an idea you know that you have. Yet, can you point at it? It is often difficult to understand “it” yourself let alone describe “it” to others. An idea is a no-thing, in our common way of looking at it, as compared to a house which we see as a thing - yet often fail to see as an embodiment of an idea. We tend to treat intangibles and tangibles differently even though both exist. This dichotomy has long ruled Western society and in a more subtitle way other cultures as well. The world of ideas and the world of things are aspects of one reality and it is through art that they most clearly merge. Art is both a mental and tactile process. In fact, art shows that the two can never actually be separated.

The pathway an idea takes from conception to physical expression is outlined by the 4 Step Recreative Process Model which describes the various transformations the idea goes through as it moves from what is erroneously called intangible to tangible and back to intangible.

click on graphic for more

It is the nature of art that the act of producing it requires a personal transformation of the maker equal to that inherent to and expressed in the art itself. In this context it is important to understand that art, in the environment being described here, is not to be learned in the conventional use of the word - it is to be done.

The act of making art is the act of expressing one’s sense of reality and experience of it. It is also one’s contribution to and reshaping of that reality. This is as true for the early scribbling with crayon of a young child as it is for the final works of a Leonardo.

In the foundational period of development, the frame by which the young child is introduced to art may be one of the most significant acts related to that child’s development and subsequent way of seeing reality. Their response to this experience may well set their attitudes about the world “out there” and their personal sense of worth and fitness - positive or negative. This sense can last a life time and never be consciously challenged. Foundational experiences and ideas can be of great value or immense detriment. Of course, this can be said about all early childhood experiences, yet, it must be remembered given the nature of it, art speaks with unusual power.

integration of fact and symbol...

In our time, we use a symbol as an abstraction of a concrete thing applied to another circumstance. In advertising, for example, connecting a product to sex is a common palming of the mental cards. In many older civilizations, a symbol was the concrete expression of a specific function of reality. When I speak of architecture as an experiential - not visual art - and being fact-based, I mean that the expression of the environment is that of the function of the building as a way to facilitate the life lived within it.This is the art of architecture. To produce a work of architecture to house the learning and doing of art, by young children, is a “doubling down” on both the practice of architecture and of art.

What art is as a function of the human mind and society is embedded in this modest environment both as a physical reality and in the way the room is to be used. The process of making art - which is how it is actually learned - and the process of operating the environment, as both context and tool, cannot be separated - they are the same thing.

Operating the environment is to use it as a tool to facilitate the entire experience of being in and working in the environment. It is to make the experience itself an act of living art. This facilitation process is not overt or heavy handed. It is simply the art of using the space as it is designed to be employed. The environment replaces a number of actions that teachers often have to take because they lack the context the environment brings by being the message of “what happens here.” This task of operating the environment is not the teacher’s alone. It is also the student’s to learn and be responsible for thus teaching what may be the most import curriculum element of all.

In this application, other than academic distinctions based on present discriminations, the differences between fine art, applied arts and crafts are ignored. At my last visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, the principle display was Colonial period weaving and frabics. Utility then, art now.

These definitions are important in the right time and place. Here the focus is on the doing and craft of the doing. It is learning basic design principles by exploring the many tools, materials, geometries, media and applications as possible. It is about practicing mind, hand, eye, materials, tools to be one.

about learning...

The greatest barrier to learning is the widely accepted and totally unsubstantiated myth that learning is difficult. Learning is as easy as breathing. Breathing also is “difficult” if someone has a repertory illness or is being chocked. Is it so difficult to understand that if you put a child into a repressive environment and demand learning on cue and by the clock that it becomes “difficult?” A walk around Master’s will instantly reveal students who are enjoying their time there. These same students are blowing away the test scores even though Master’s does not teach to and for the test results. With the existing Master’s architecture - which is typical of the 20th Century although used about as well as it can be given its limits - the goal it to move from shelter and utility to augmentation and art. The environment becomes an active agent in the learning process instead of a pile of arbitrary and unnecessary constraints. The entire environment, with teachers, parents, students; the community around the school and the virtual community of like minded students and teachers; all become a learning system.

This learning system facilitates - “to make easy” - the learning process of all. This is how a stable and sustainable, evolving system is accomplished.

The learning of art is perhaps one of the easiest processes, for the young student, of all. However, what art and what view of art, as a function, and how each individual engages in and relates to art, is a more complex proposition. The skills are relatively easy - the context, in today’s world, is not. It is not skill which determines the artist. Skill is required. It is having something to say which drives the passion and the fuels the work necessary to say it. The “saying” often takes unusual courage and the rewards are rarely as easy and fast as can be found in safer conventional fields. The same can be said for the act of perceiving and “using, consuming, applying, supporting art” - these words alone indicate some of the problems we have with this aspect of the process. Saying you “own” a piece of art is like “owning a cat.” In reality, the cat owns you and you are captured by the art.

about art...

Art has become an object more than practiced as a process and function. This tends to take art out of life and make it something more or less passively consumed. Art has become something that “artists do” at sacrifice to being a natural function of living and a process that all humanity engages in as an expression of the act of living. Art has also become a tool of false merchandising and propaganda. Art and artists have become socially objectified rather than integrated into the life of society. These circumstances may become less ubiquitous if knowledge of art was more common. Knowledge based on the ability to do art and thus understand its making and power. A consequence of these distortions of artistic impulse and practice is that art is often taught in a way which reinforces this negative social outcome. The typical cliche of “the artist” being but one example. A cliche all the more dangerous as the power of the myth, and the resulting interactions between artist and society, makes it often become true. This is a classic locked in positive feedback loop on the social scale.

Art always involves play and it is one of the most serious activities Humanity engages in. Art, by nature, is often disturbing as it forces us to see in different ways from our habit. Art can never be safe yet the space for learning it and producing it can be safe - and must be - in the case of the development of young children.

Art also requires great technical acuity. This is often overlooked. The better the art the greater knowledge required about material and processes; and, the greater perception required about nature, humanity and the real aspects and potential of society. Over the centuries many technical advances came out of the pursuit of art. Artists are often on the forefront of applying new technology as means to create new expressions. This close coupling of art and technology is often overlooked and rarely found in the classroom as there is often a misguided attempt to make the technology behind the tools and materials easy and prepackaged. This is a great mistake.

click on the drawings and pictures below to go to supporting documents

link coming

The Sketch Up model provides an animation with multiple views of the Art Studio.

Download the model by clicking on the picture above. It is 100 plus megabytes and will take some time. Sketch Up is free from Google. Get SU, download the model, go to “view, “animation,” “play,” to view the Art Studio Animation.

link coming

operating the art studio...

Most buildings are treated like a dead static thing. Some are nicely maintained and refreshed from time to time with new arrangements of furniture, art and plants. Very few are operated as a tool and symbol of a specific purpose and mission. It is a rare building, even if built with the quality to allow it, that gets better with age. It take skill and diligence to design and build an authentic space - it takes much more to keep and improve it after construction. This is why architecture has to address design, build and use as a single process. The real art of architecture comes in the years after its making.

It may seem strange to say it yet the fact is few buildings are actually designed to be used. They are too generic, designed to accommodate everything and nothing. By used, I mean properly employed for the entire life cycle of a building. I mean being adaptable as the requirements of use change. I mean being build to be gracefully altered. I mean be able to remain fit in an evolving ecology-economy; able to integrate new technologies, work and life styles. I mean to do all this while keeping its own integrity, special quality and at any moment meet the requirements of use in concrete, specific terms in an affordable way. All the while, remaining a work of art; remaining an expression of an unique view of life and of the world and values of the life it shelters. This is true sustainability.

It is in this context I use the term “ to operate.” To operate is to not be in a passive relationship with the environment - it is to be an active partner. There are three principle ways the teacher can do this: First, to develop the protocols and rules-of-engagement which govern the space. Second, to be an exemplar of a creative user of the space. Third, facilitate, the students managing and working in the space within the rules established. This includes a formal means for the rules to be recreated. Thus, using the environment is done by the same method that teaching and leaning - and producing - of art is accomplished. The environment merges with the experience.

art and design thinking...

If you want “design thinking,” learn to do art. Then, make everything you do an art.

This is what Apple does. Every aspect of the Apple experience is designed and it is an integrated experience. Brand, functionality, service, packaging, the sales process, support, the web site and the store environments all convey the same message. At the same time, the product is undergoing aggressive innovation. Innovation which requires constant, in the case of Apple products, reduction in size and weight, increase in power, features and battery life with integration across platforms and what was once thought of as different categories. This is but a small taste of the future world of business. This thinking, along with the overall strategy of the business position and placement in the market, and the remaking of markets, is design thinking. Apple has gone from a marginal “has been” company to the technology company with the highest evaluation, in 10 years, by going back to its origins. To Quote Jobs, “ merging technology and the humanities is in our DNA.”

What is important is not if you like Apple or not or if they continue to succeed or not. What is important is that they demonstrated, in the highly competitive world of technology, the value of bringing design to every aspect of your experience with their product. They closed the technology-art gap and recognized them as one thing. They focused on the experience of use. The complete beginning to end user experience. They created a physical and virtual environment as an interface of you to them and made this environment directly expressive of their philosophy and products. And, people responded. Art has always been about design. The design of bringing abstract perceptions and ideas to form and life. The design of the technical aspects of doing so. The design of “placing” the product-art into the marketplace of ideas and social perception. Design of the way to produce the art. Design of a life-time that makes it possible to do all of this with success and humanity.

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It is difficult to find a human populated time and place - in a material record which goes back well beyond 10,000 years - where there is no art of any kind. The forms this art has taken are remarkable in their variety and the high quality of the work reaching back to the earliest known times of Humanity. Each era and place has chosen to focus on certain aspects of art making and subject matter. Art, technology and social architecture have a reciprocal relationship each feeding and stimulating the other. Traditionally, art has been taught by apprenticeship. It is the quintessential “learn by doing” subject. Art is perhaps unique in the degree and scope in which it penetrates into every aspect nook and cranny of human life. Yet, it remains a mystery to the vast majority of our population - an impulse and process so deeply imbedded that it is hardly recognized for what it is and what it does.

The making of art, as it is now socially objectified, remains on the fringe of everyday life. What is called “fine” art is supported largely by the elite in a patronage system which goes back centuries. “Applied” art is seen as a business and is too often the captured creature of commerce. Most “art” which people do everyday as part of simply living, with exceptions like Japan in earlier periods, is rarely seen as such. Nor is there much recognition of “fringe” arts such as graphic novels and many products of the gamming industry. Industrial design is a huge field yet rarely seen as art. And now, we enter the so-called “design economy” as if this is something totally new and unrelated to the tradition of art. Things are confused.

Visual Arts are held distinct from music, performance, writing in its many forms and certain aspects of math and science which are treated very much by their practitioners as an art form. Business and government applications like simulations, meeting design, presentation and decision processes are not typically seen and a product of design and a potential practice of high art.

These many classification have a certain utility in regards study and the formation of professional organizations yet may be harmful in three major aspects which are central to the project in focus here. First by obscuring the broad commonweal of all these arts, the young person may be adversely guided into a “professional” framework too early. Second, it is design and the design process which underlies all of these forms and ties them together no matter the superficial differences of their form, material and purpose. Learning of the general processes as distinct from the “application” can be inhibited. Last, the emerging future trend is toward a strong mixing of art and design forms and applications. A too rigid classification of what art is and is not may blunt the young student’s ability to see these new “mesh works” and inhibit the ability to appreciate and activity participate in new forms of expression.

There have been times when the distinctions I note above did not rule our sense of art and its purpose. I think we may be returning to such a time. More importantly, in the early stages of learning and practice no matter what may - on not - turn out to be a given culture’s preferences of categorization, all forms of art and craft “fine” and applied, new and old, should be presented on a level playing field and mixed together so the student can explore the full menu. Wholeness and integration is a good place to begin. Personal preferences should evolve organically - and best, slowly.

The average person - actually there is no such thing - has far more “artistic” skill than is typically recognized. The are several reasons for this. one, is the categorization I refer to above. If a person does not fit into these it is easy to assume “I am not artistic.” Another can be an early experience at home or school. Have you thought how big a pencil can be to a young person - or a chair and table? Imagine, even as a skilled adult, trying to draw, paint or sculpt - even think - in an environment scaled this way to your present size. The right (i.e. wrong) setting, and impatient adult, the laughter of peers can easily persuade one without a larger context to “give up” and go do something else. Another aspect is that at any given time there is, in most societies, a strong meme of the good - and a suggestion that what does not conform is “bad” work. Hardly a prescription for innovation or individual expression. Imposed standards of beauty can do great harm in many areas of human life and cause both trauma and retreat from trying. It took me 19 years, from 1951 to 1960 before I designed a building I thought - and still do 51 years later - was exactly the result I wanted. Some people may think I have great inherent design talent. It is more likely that I am just stubborn and not easily inclined to give up. I remember how long it took and how difficult it was. This is one reason why I am able to teach design successfully - I remember.

The student should not be rushed to learn too much too early, nor, held back from learning at their own natural rate. Mastery in any subject takes a long time. Today there is a great deal of artificial education all bound up in theory, abstractions and propositions taught without the underlying knowledge being won by direct exploration and personal verification. I have worked with many young engineers just out of school who know the math and what equation to apply to what situation yet have no sense of what is being described by those numbers nor do they have a feel for the structures they are “designing.” They learn abstractions in school and engineering years after they get out - those that do.

Although the subject and nuance of a work of art may be abstract, the making of it is specific, concrete and material. The feedback of each step is direct and usually immediate. Success requires a mental-physical integration rarely found in our society today. This skill, and the experience of gaining it, is one of the most important for the student to master. It needs to be taught and learned in a way that the broader application to other subjects and life in general is grasped by the student and actively built upon. If the student is not aided in making the broader connections then only a specific has be taught in a way which obscures true learning. if you think deeply about this not only in this circumstance has training trumped education, in a practical sense, we do not have the resources to squander opportunity like this.

Art is stimulated by intense social interaction yet more often than not produced by periods of isolation. It is important to simulate these modes in the Art Room. Anyone who has worked in a drafting room or an open office environment knows the tug and pull between needed interaction time and private time. The preferences of everyone will rarely match up as many will be in different stages of their work. From an educational standpoint, just the fact of these conditions is an opportunity for learning. Relating the Stages of the Creative Process to the modes of interaction and private time provide students with a map they rarely get except at school like Master’s where the same models used in business schools are use in all grades and related to appropriate subjects. Additionally, establishing rules-of-engagement for different modes of work, at different times of the classroom period, provides practice on how to share personal and commons space. This is an awareness and skill unfortunately learned far too late - if at all - by many in our society. All work shares this contest between different kinds of work, different work preferences and the circumstance of people being in a different “place” in the process. It is fair to say that with what we typically call “creative work” (there should be no other kind), this issue is intensified. The students learn of these things by observation, by being introduced to models which frame the subject, and by being responsible for monitoring their own actions and mutually managing their commons space successfully. A great social skill needed now more than ever.

One of the major functions of the Art Studio is to simulate real life. This is not a simulation of an adult society as it now is as much of this will be different by the time these students are adults. It is not about trying to make them all into artists on any other career in the particular. It is about learning to be creative and have mind-hand skills in an environment which supports this kind of activity - an environment they can learn to understand, operate and ultimately make for themselves. It is about dreaming a better future and learning the art of making one.

All media is multimedia. In this environment pencils, paint, markers for WorkWalls and paper, fabrics, clay, card board, wood, are combined with digital capture, working and publishing. From the oldest tools of Humanity to the most advanced, in single use or mixed, all are available for exploration, study and the making of art, individually and in teams.

three students on the WorkWall
designing their Project

The environment is populated with models - conceptual and physical - books, works of art - from artists of all ages and students - music, video streaming - on nature, other studios, documentations and conferencing - materials of many kinds, tools - hand and computer - and music. Work is project based, designed by the students with facilitation and oversight of the Teacher.

Skills, and art history are taught in context of projects. All curriculum is woven in based on the questions and observations which arise from the design, execution and publishing/sharing of the projects.

a Remote Presence two way feed
between the Art Studio and the Master’s
Collaboration Studio where older student are working

Everything speaks and everything is used. The kite was designed and built by a student team, after studying the art, flown for the entire school, and now hangs from the skylight into the Studio space - demonstrating the architectural diagonal - as a piece of art and Strong Memory of the experience. The Teacher, with several students, is on a conference with another school reviewing a student show that is underway.

In all of the illustrations shown here, the class is just beginning. Some students are already at work on projects, some with the teacher and others getting their personal project boxes out and setting up. The routine has formal and informal times, individual, team and full group work and instruction.

a video stream of a pair of Eagles
raising three baby Raptors

It is the interaction between “agents” which stimulate and combine and recombine in emergent ways which embeds in the environment mind-like attributes. This is not metaphor, it is reality. An “Agent,” in this way of making a collaborative learning environment, is everything which makes up the physical place, the forms of the space, the objects within it and connected to it, and the human minds and hands engaged with it. It is the processes within the space which “animate” the action between agents of different kinds which otherwise cannot communicate in ways optimal for learning, collaboration and design. Organic minds have these neural pathways; systems made up of what are called animate and non-animate have to be connected with a variety of organic and mechanical means by algorithms expressed as protocols and procedures.

a “trhee cat” exercise underway

Iteration and recursion are two aspects of design and systems which have to be understood if competency of an art is to be achieved. In playing with the model train, understating what is represented in the model and also left out, drawing it from various viewpoints, and perhaps even then building a more detailed model brings a level of understanding which comes no other way. Merely looking at it reveals little. We do not think only “in our heads.” The entire body is a sense organ and memory is stored throughout it. Knowing with the hands, even the sound, texture and smell of a material being worked, is a rich source of information, and memory of, how things work which can be applied to many activities that seem far removed from an exercise in the Art Studio. The specialization and ready made manufacturing and packaging of nearly everything in our society robs us of much tactile sensibility. The old crafts should not be forgotten as their basic simplicity reveals aspects that are not easily understood from computer models and slick, advanced highly packaged tools.

clay is one of the most basic of materials
and a great way to “feel” how something
goes together

The art of folding a flat plane into a complex three dimensional shape is a great cognitive challenge for most everyone. It is mind-brain-hand exercise at its best. The development of this field of art in the last few years has been spectacular. In its level of abstraction, the required ability to see ahead, the process of making complexity from simple linear moves, this art rivals music and mathematics and is one of the best physical demonstrations of emergence I know. It is all done from a sheet of paper and some simple tools. paper folding is also a good example of simple means requiring high conceptual skills and fine dexterity to archive a good result. Much learning is left abstract which means the student is actually not required to test it only repeat it. Art generally requires at least some proof of concept in order to produce it at all. As anyone who has picked up a pencil and tried to draw out an idea knows, the translation from an idea in the mind to a representation on papers is a far more demanding process than it often appears. This is the reality of the 4 Step Recreation Model.

While the Art Studio functions well as a room with regular instruction from the Teacher, it also works for group dialogs and hands-on work in small groups and by individuals. The raised, stepped platform view down to the display wall aids all of these different modalities. It also helps compensate for different the students sizes so common at this age.

In the SE lower corner
of the Art Center
the Teacher has a personal work area

The Teacher Area has a Wing desk, rocker, lockable lateral files and storage area. How s/he keeps the area is an example and standard for the entire room and how the students are to maintain their tools and space. Each student has a project box for their personal project materials and there are also kits for different tool and material collections to be used in commons. These are stored in the shelving alone with art objects, material samples, models, books, portfolios, and so on. Everything is for use and for “show.” The space and its products are its own decoration.

two iPads control all lighting controls
and power usage
as well as temperature in the room
by moving screen sliders

The skylight provides North light and collects both heat by passive means and electrical power by active cells. Each class will have a student Monitor of the week to balance use with supply. This facilitates awareness of where energy comes from and the cost of various use patterns. The room will operate totally off grid but will remain connected for emergency purposes and to sell power back to the energy company, funds from which will go to the class budget. This is one of many ways the Art Studio and its students stay connected to the world and its condition.

theme...

There are several conditions out of which this project comes which cannot fail to be memory in the final result. Today, this space is the unused loft looking down into an active gym which is the main recreation area of the Academy. The Art Studio will re purpose an existing space as the first comprehensive improvement of the physical environment of the original part of the Campus built in the 1950s. Although still constrained in a “room,” it is the opening step in the remaking of the entire Campus. A prelude of things to come. With the North skylight and South solar collector, it is the first learning area with expressive vertical space.

These are new facts to be added to those named above: The new Art Studio space is heavy on Prospect in the prospect-refuge equation. The student’s age is also a key factor as this is the time when the first “serious” attitudes regarding art usually begin. If used as designed - as a tool to explore and express individual views of reality and a place to learn the disciplines of craft - coupled with its history, the Art Room is a place - a keep - of emergent potential. And, while exploratory and playful, it should be run as a creative commons like a quality design office is facilitated.

language...

Art by definition speaks in an universal language even as it expresses the nuances of individual cultures and artists. Art also gives rise to proto-languages such as Pattern Language in Architecture as only one example. Art has long been a direct channel through which philosophies of many eras have “spoken.” Art cannot be taught, done or appreciated without understanding of this else it becomes mechanical and trivial. How this is “understood” varies with personality, age and psychology. This understanding is also highly effected by the culture in which the art is learned, designed, produced and published.

This means that walking into the Art Studio one in fact is entering into a dialog of languages expressing many ideas, paradigms, viewpoints and alternative realities though a wide variety of different media. This is of course true of any room. In a place of art and other intense concentrations of human work and craft this reality is compounded and made more explicit. In the case of the Art Studio, it is intended to be iconic - designed, crafted and managed as a practical art in itself as one example of what is to be learned.

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a matrix of design/build and construction system criteria:

learning method

envionment as facilitator

technical system and tools

Involve all curriculum

Our traditional technologies and social paradigm, have divided human knowledge into categories and departments of learning. This has provided a certain convenience but also restricted integrated thinking and action. Art as a subject and practice is an ideal integrator of all the curriculum.

provide in the deep structure and process of the Art Studio instruction and student projects process the discipline of connecting subjects and work to the other courses of the school and human knowledge in general

globally connected

Today we have a global economy without adequate intimate person to person global connectedness and awareness of each other’s context and situation. The consequences are negative and the challenges of tomorrow will not be met only made greater and more difficult.

provide “remote presence” and “remote collaboration,” without cultural bias, facilitating a natural coming-to-knowing which allows a natural non-forced understanding to emerge thereby allowing mutual learning and respect

mind/body, hand/eye/senses integration

In athletics there is the “sweet spot.” In philosophy religion there is the “state-of-grace.” These states while of different circumstances are the moments when mind-body, me-they, in here-out there distinctions dissolve and one become ONE. Creative work is one path to this state.

provide the physical-mental context and process to bring learning and creating into a meditative, self-aware state of flow which dissolves artificial distinctions and fuses intent-output

project based

Project-based learning is often seen as a technique instead of a reality. In fact, there is not such thing as non-project based learning it is just that “the project” in the student’s mind (at any moment) is not known and may be of little value. One can learn only by connecting. To what is critical.

provide an objective, rule-based, fair means by which student projects are selected, tied to curriculum and study plans, traced and measured, altered when necessary, always requiring dialog between student and Teacher

student initiative and contract

With all the value which, school, parents, fellow students, teachers, and society can bring to the student, the sooner the student learns they are responsible for their education the better. The actual handoff of this responsibility to the student must be a gradual steady process over years.

provide a method of collaborative negotiation/contracting between Teacher and student progressively transferring the responsibility of education to the student without losing the school’s fiduciary duty/authority.

being fact, symbol and tool

Much art today is dangerous in its misuse and abuse of symbol. As has been noted often, if modern architects understood symbolism there faces would be red. This is only one example. Tools in our society are use carelessly. The art Studio is designed to be a healthy environment.

provide an in-fact, experience-based and symbolic expression of a healthy mental/physical response to the act of living in our times and the kind of future we want while providing means without contradiction of our creed

everybody teaches, everybody learns

Technique aside, everyone is a teacher and a student because each of us has unique experiences which lead to an unique way of perceiving reality. A teacher is one who has earned specific knowledge and also has leaned to convey it - a necessary skill for everyone.

provide an environment of learners and teachers filled with human and nature works which illustrate the design and engineering of solutions and the art of expressing aspects of their function and place in the world

24/7/365 operation

There are practical and safety issues which have to be solved yet the idea remains that facilities like the Art Studio should be accessible to the student a close to “anytime” as possible. Formal teaching and the high activity of the classes make prospect. Quite time alone, or with a few, provides refuge.

provide the maximum access possible, for private unscripted time, as an art of any kind is not something which can be turned on an off by the dictates of an arbitrary schedule

in residence program

Variety of thought, insight into techniques and methods and providing an exemplar in the flesh are some of the many benefits of a residency program. This, like the use of computers and media, also frees the teacher to focus deeper with students. This program cannot start too early.

provide a residency program which is not an active artist coming to lecture and teach only but to renew, (re) learn and work collaboratively with teachers and students on projects requiring mutual growth for all

mixed ages

Grouping students in lower, middle and upper schools is a good structure as there are real developmental periods in childhood. Having all the schools together on one Campus is better than large segregated systems. Mixing ages in some activities and courses provides unique benefit.

provide “visiting artist” students of various ages from Master’s and other schools to visit - virtually and in place - to teach and learn by participating in real Master’s projects with practicing adult artists to do work, not instruct.

room is off the grid

Art embraces all existence including what we call humanity, civilization, nature and pure invention as if these were not but one thing. Often, art in the school tends to ignore the reality of time, season, weather and where resources and tools come from loosing sense of ecology/economy.

provide a sense of place, time and resource by equipping the Art Studio with its own energy capture, monitoring and control system so that the students have to “spend” wisely for their benefit in producing their work

embedded in multimedia

The basis of the Art Studio is the tight integration of physical environment, work (learning) processes and technology augmentation. These, as one, make the environment. Multi-media is not in this environment, it is an attribute of the environment within which students work/learn.

provide an environment of media in which the teacher(s) students, learn, enjoy, use and make art which is composed of media in multiple forms, materials and the technical means for achieving to their personal expression

the 10 step process

Memory happens automatically in a living being although the memory itself is shaped by the experiences remembered. So it is reordered in what we can inanimate objects. All that there is is life yet different life forms require a means to communicate and reach synergy together.

provide a means to note each significant transaction-transition of idea into physical expression - and visa versa - so that the library of experience of the Art Room builds day by day

tooling

It has been noted by Kevin Kelly that all tools that Humankind has ever developed are mostly still in use somewhere on Earth. Sometimes the old ones are better than the new. The real point is that tools are not neutral. Each one embodies a paradigm, an unique way of seeing and working.

provide as wide a variety in kind and type of art/craft making tools as possible, from the most simple and old to the most modern and technical, as a “kit” of possible material-shaping-making means of expression

publishing

That which is not published and distributed in some way does not exist in the social sense and for art this means the cycle is truncated at the half way point. In this circumstance, it can be argued that a work falls short of the full definition of art and significant learning and value is lost.

provide means for each student, and teams of students, to publish their work within the context of their experience of Master’s, and their broader community, as well as, publishing work of students throughout the world.

Although constrained by space and the existing geometry of the 1950s building, the Art Studio will be the first built example, the first hint of Master’s 21st Century learning environment which will evolve through the Phase I, II & III design and construction work. It will be the first space wherein the actions of the teachers and students will be connected to real-time, real world feedback of many kinds - ecological, energy availability, social events, learning networks - as an integral aspect of the built environment itself.

This result is accomplished by applying biomimicry and organic architecture principles with Pattern Language to the entire design, build, use cycle which repeats many iterations throughout the entire life cycle of the physical building and its use. The Art Studio is never done. It continues to evolve by use. New aspects of the environment provoke ideas for new uses which in turn suggest alterations to the environment. The process of design and the application of craft thus becomes the living context for learning design, art and craft work.

The Monkey’s Paw is an English Victorian parable about the use and abuse of tooling. This is a message most needed in our society today. We teach how to use a tool but not what a tool is. The arts and crafts are the experience of tool making and using - the foundation of an industrial society.

The 10 Step Process is the engine of documentation, archiving and memory-keeping of an organization. It is a necessary creative habit of the habitat of learning, working and the production of tangible and intangible goods. Every transaction of the Art Studio is complete only at step 10.

the teacher as facilitator...

The Five Points of Mastery Model describes five competencies every teacher must have and every student aspire to. These competencies have to be practiced, by teachers and students, as an integral part of the daily activities of the Art Studio.

In terms of this Model, the Teacher is both practitioner and exemplar of its principles. By doing so, s/he facilitates the entire process of the space thus bringing rigor to it while promoting maximum, independent self-responsibility on the part of the student while forging the environment which promotes the greatest opportunity for emergent, creativity - a necessary condition for the understanding and making art.

the five points of mastery...

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posted: April 9, 2011 • revised April 24, 2011 - 4:38 PM @ Elsewhere