Design School Pioneers in Creative Approach

Certainly one branch of the University exempt from the charge of overisolation in a stultifying academic community is the Faculty of Design. The courses in the Graduate School of Design and the Department of Architectural Sciences are singular within the University for their orientation towards learning as a process of active participation in original, creative work.

To the continual and professional complaints that the University is a sterile mortuary for the creative artist the Design School offers contrary evidence that successful training is possible in fields not limited to the exercise of the critical interpretative facilities but also in those relying upon artistic creativity. The efforts and results of the GSD and Arch. Sci. Department in the teaching of the visual arts assumes particular importance in a society whose increased awareness and concern for the role of the visual arts is especially notable against the background of nearly complete neglect which characterized its attitude towards these fields in the past.

Today everyone is engaged in seeking culture: book and record-of-the-month clubs flourish; people, according to an amazed Time Magazine, actually buy paintings, and Fine Arts 13 is crowded. While the culture boom has been conspicious in the field of the "fine arts" one need not be a sociologist with a Ph.D. or even a reader of the New Yorker to be aware that the popularity and prestige of wall to wall hi-fi sets, automobiles that will fit through your front door, and modern houses without doors lies in their association in the public mind with "modern" comfort and culture. If art appreciation no longer constitutes the badge of the avant-garde nor is limited to the culture containers at Smith and Wellesley, a parallel phenomenon to the culturalization of the bourgeoisie has been the increasingly bourgeois nature of culture. In gaining wider acceptance the forms have undergone alterations: the "modern split level colonial ranch house with cathedral ceilings" advertised in suburban Boston hardly describes Wright's "Falling Water."

Undoubtedly a major feature of the current quest for culture is a desire, heavy with overtones of both social snobbery and cultural inferiority, to "understand" what art is all about. Courses telling a person how to look at a piece of art or records explaining what it is that the hearer is hearing continue to attract large audiences and fat profits. "I want to learn to appreciate art," is a common pronouncement of anxious masses fearful whether they are not "complete" persons until they do. It is such a context that gives so great importance to the methods and approach of the Faculty of Design in its attempt to enable a student to achieve a real understanding of the visual arts.

The traditional answer to this demand to accquire a reasonable comprehension of the arts has been the historical method, best exemplified by Fine Arts 13 and Music 1. Walter Gropius, famed professor emeritus, castigates this approach for an undue reliance upon "passive absorbtion" instead of upon active creation. As the 1956 Report of the Committee on the Visual Arts indicated, there is a valid and necessary place for such a verbal approach, but it should not be considered sufficient by itself to convey a deep understanding of the artistic processes--essentially non-verbal--which play such a widespread role in society. Along this line the introduction of the new Music 2 course in theory for non-concentrators in that field can only be welcomed as an example of another excellent non-historical method.

Dean Jose Luis Sert and the GSD are quite conscious that the opposition between the two approaches is particularly relevent to architecture. Another way to frame the contrast is in the opposition between the old eclectic method whereby the student looked to traditional styles for design forms and the modern approach which stresses the need for a unique design solution for every different set of conditions.

"Design," said Gropius, "must be an innate and organic part of the student. He must blend experience into himself instead of copying. Yes, the great masters should be analyzed--to discover how they found their means of expression out of the conditions of their times. But those means can not be imitated in our conditions and times."

In Robinson Hall Professor N. T. Newton, Chairman of the Department of Architectural Sciences, repeated the same theme. "There may be relationships, such as proportion," he stated, "that we feel can be used today, but to copy the exact form does not follow. Our educational system has been built upon an over-regard for similarity, yet it is the differences after all that count.... What we need to do is to let the form of a design evolve out of the place and times and human need."

Outside of the undergraduate Department of Architectural Sciences the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City and Regional Planning are concerned with the professional training of graduate students. Facilities currently are under heavy strain since 220 students are enrolled in GSD while Hunt and Robinson Halls can really accommodate a maximum of only 200. Plans are being made for a campaign to enlarge the physical plant of the school. No increase in the enrollment is foreseen, according to Dean Sert, in order to preserve the close knit character of the small school.

Students in all three fields share an integrated curriculum for part of the first year in an effort to demonstrate the close inter-connection of the practice of architecture with civic and social problems, and of city planning with aesthetic design. Indeed the separation into distinct departments is a reflection of the high specialization in civic design in this country; in many foreign countries the distinction between architect and urbanist is considered artificial and dangerous in its encouragement of an overly technical and mechanical approach--planners computing the incremental cost of the necessary cubic feet of air per average inhabitant in a sanitized superblock--without regard for the human element involved.

This danger is partially offset at the GSD through the collaborative projects undertaken by the advanced students of the three departments. Times Square, Park Square in Boston, and the portion of Cambridge between Harvard and MIT have been project subjects in the past. Besides leading to a mutual appreciation of each other's role these joint efforts provide the students an opportunity to encounter the complexity entailed in a plan complete with its economic, political, technological, social and aesthetic aspects.

The dual nature of an architect as both an artist and a master of a technology poses a temptation to favour one aspect over the other. Yet it is obvious that one without the other leads to mere emptiness and in fact is impossible. As in any creative work the content can not be seperated from the style or technique of execution.

In architecture it comes down to Gropius's statement that a designer "expresses his ideas of form with the technique and material at his command." Therefore in studio design courses, the core of the GSD curriculum, "Emphasis on such visual considerations as composition and proportion is shared by equal attention to the mechanical and structural considerations that influence design."

There are also courses devoted primarily to technical problems, such as Arch. Sci. 253--Reinforced Concrete Design. As a further step the three departments require the students to spend one summer at practical professional experience. Recognizing that one cannot learn flashing and sheathing from a draughting board the Department of Architecture recommends a job in the field. So one recent student found employment as a hod carrier.

Contributing to the feeling of activity at the GSD, indeed essential to it, is the outside professional activity of most of the Faculty members. Dean Sert himself sets the example with his own busy private practice and extensive participation in Cambridge and University affairs. The result is the antithesis of a picture of academic sterility. One student remarked, "I can never get hold of my adviser because he is off on the job somewhere."

It is in the undergraduate Department of Architectural Sciences, however, that the faith in architecture as more than a technical profession becomes most clear and that the Faculty of Design plays an important role in demonstrating the integral connection between an understanding of the visual arts and a general education.

Newton emphasizes that the Faculty does not look upon the Arch. Sci. program as only a preparation for the GSD. Like all the departments of the College it is non-professional. (However, it is possible for qualified seniors to combine the last year of college studies and the first year in GSD. Last year only nine of 16 persons qualified took the option.) Instead Newton believes that Arch. Sci. "is as legitimate a field for general education as any other." It serves as an introduction to a profession whose basis is no less than "fulfillment of the social requirements of our times." In the words of the catalogue the work of the graduate student, "tends toward the establishment of an imaginative order that should be the expression of our physical and spiritual requirements. This order is achieved by the intelligent and sensitive use of forms, structures, enclosures, surfaces, and colors, which make for better and more beautiful environments." Arch. Sci. provides an initiation into this realm. The broad range of courses offered aims to fill in a student's background in the field of visual arts and introduce him to some of the social implications of design. The outcome, Newton insists, is a polity of intelligent citizens aware visually of their social and spiritual environment.

Even here the stress on the creative studio method of learning is maintained. "Fine Arts is about something, we are in something," was the way one member of the Department put it. The students distinctly feel that theirs is an artistic approach rather than a critical one, although the end result is, hopefully, a critical ability.

Central place in the undergraduate program belongs to the workshop courses in drawing and design fundamentals at the Design Center on Memorial Drive. The courses have proven so popular that they are to a large extent responsible for the increased number of concentrators, now over one hundred, according to the Dean. Furthermore they have attracted so many non-concentrators--about one-third of the classes--an additional instructor has been hired.

Direction of the workshop rests with Mirko Basldella, noted Italian artist who joined the Department two years ago. Under his guidance students experiment with the properties of line, color, texture and the various media. The courses are not directed to architectural design but are rather concerned with having the student gain experience with "the fundamentals of design" in its widest sense; and consequently the students play with three dimensional wire models, geometric patterns, and metal masks. The presence of a first rate artist directing the courses is note-worthy; it is comparable in kind, if perhaps not in degree, to the writing courses of MacLeish and the composition courses of Piston.

The importance assigned by the GSD to workshop type courses is evident from its desire that entering students should display some such in their background. Indeed there have been sporadic suggestions in the past that a similar course in visual design be required of all undergraduates, as it is at many other institutions. Unlikely as it is, such a suggestion reflects the concern of many that the normal academic education neglects this field, which is a major element in our contemporary society.

In the words of the Committee on the Visual Arts, "Less and less is modern man swayed by the argument of the written word, and more and more by the photograph, the bill-board, the cinema, the picture magazine, and now television. Until both sender and receiver of these visual messages are trained in the twin arts of perception and discrimination, the educated man may hardly claim to be the master of his own environment.