Foundations

The Bauhaus model of design education has dominated US universities for more than one hundred years, and Chicago has served as its epicenter. When I joined the faculty at Columbia College, I was tasked with updating a Bauhausian first year curriculum to better target the needs of aspiring creative professionals without throwing out a century of time-tested material.

In collaboration with a number of fellow faculty, I lead the development of Foundation Studio, a project-based first year course. While the core concepts that represent classic formal analysis remain, they are employed in service of broader conceptual questions that can be solved with a variety of traditional and digital media.

For the Portrait project, students research the ghosts, demons, and monsters of a culture that is not their own, then build a festival head, or cabezudo, in response to their findings. Topics includes appreciation vs. appropriation, structural cardboard fabrication, wearables, photo documentation, and working at large scale.

The Derby project starts with an overview of car culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Japanese Bosozuko. Carpentry skills are also introduced, including the band saw, drill press, bench sander, and pneumatic brad gun. Students projects must embody conceptual research and also make it down the 40' ramp we constructed so that the course sections can race one another in a department-wide bracket.

For the Site project each student picks a neighborhood in Chicago, determines what makes it unique, then creates an artwork to install there. The medium for Site is completely up to the students, and can be realized with perfomative intervention, audio documentary, experimental video, yarn bombing, publicly installed sculpture, and more, as long as the result exemplifies research, iteration, technical rigor, conceptual depth, and excellent documentation.