Rural Studio
Oct 13, 01:12 PM
Based in the School of Architecture at Auburn University Alabama, Rural Studio forms part of a commitment to bridge learning in academia with ‘real’ world needs and problems. Along with the Urban studio programme, students create/design/build for local community contexts, putting education and learning to work creatively in meeting the needs of people and place. The mission of The Rural Studio is to allow students to find solutions to the needs of the community within the community’s own context, not from outside it. Abstract ideas based upon knowledge and study are transformed into workable solutions forged by real human contact, personal realization, and a gained appreciation for the culture.
The Rural Studio consists of three programs across the period of study – all taking students out of the institution to “form teams, to plan, design and build community projects”. Key to Rural Studio, is the making of ideas into habitable, affordable buildings. The 20K house is a unique project at the Rural Studio. The design for the house is not client or site specific, but rather intended as a prototype for low-income housing in Hale County. At present there does not exist a precedent for a house that can be built for $10,000 materials and $10,000 labor and profit. The 20K house aims to create that precedent [...] giving people an alternative to substandard housing or trailers.
Students at Rural studio offer up blogs of their projects as the process progresses, offering fantastic visual and personal insights to the making and realisation of ideas. Reminiscent of the communality of barn raising, each project opens up the richness of dialogue and relations that are built up between students and those who will live in and use the architecture.
Do schools kill creativity?
Dec 9, 04:33 PM
In this short presentation for the annual TED conference, Ken Robinson, makes the case for “creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it”. Ken Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy. His book Out of our minds explores the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and particularly in our educational systems.
For more interviews and information on the work of Ken Robinson, check out the following sites:
IMNO
Ken Robinson
No real than you are: legomen, and performative acts of participation in public space
Sep 6, 11:21 AM
Reuters reported that A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday. Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-metre (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.
“We saw something bobbing about in the sea” said one of the workers “and we decided to take it out of the water – it was a life-sized Lego toy.”
I’m not sure, maybe as some say, this is a big hoax – lego and lego art has phenomenal interest; it even has some parodying of ‘art’, such as Udronotto’s reproduction of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk on flickr.
What’s for sure is that it’s captured the antennae of news companies around the world and led to some great images of people interacting with this strange, unidentified object on the Zandvoort beach. It made me think of Big things on the beach’s work and their aims to bring new life into the Portobello beachfront through the commissioning of temporary pieces of public art.
Most recently, when I visited Hill Jephson Robb’s work Wonder – a series of giant pyramids, which far from unannounced, involved visitors and residents directly in their construction – it had taken on yet another kind of life. The artist no longer present, children, teenagers and adults, climbed, lay down on top of, used as a viewpoint to the sea or ran between – visitors seemed to ‘join up’ the objects, laying new claim to them as just another part of the life of the beach. Whether people look on Wonder – as art or not, or judge as good or bad – as so often is the critique – what remained that day showed how easily people take hold of something as their own and give it other kinds of meaning in their response to it.
In his book the Return of the real, Hal Foster wrote many years ago now about his experience of “being taken to school by a six-year-old” at an exhibition of work by Robert Morris. Free of any ideas about what this art was, or the ‘etiquette’ of a gallery, she “played on the beams” skipping around the room as the “critic” and the “artist informed in contemporary art” recognized that their “theory” was “no match for her practice”.
If we’re to gain insight to wider relations with objects and ideas as they are made and placed in the world, it seems critical that these kinds of reactions by people to the real as it moves into new spaces, are observed and listened to. Rogoff’s research into ideas of looking away – what happens when we let our guard down and let go of what we know or think we know in order to open ourselves up to new forms of thinking – offers a similar experience and observation of an exhibition, this time at the Courtauld Institute. In listening into the responses of the visitors who – like herself had felt intimidated by the space of the Courtauld – she explains how:
“a form of participation was taking place in which some façade of privilege, of class and cultural exclusion, of supposedly rarefied learning, had been breached and the viewers were trying to figure out what exactly had kept them outside, had kept them at bay […] the project probably had in mind some notion of ‘democratisation’ and ‘accessibility’ through undoing the boundaries of elevated separation and inserting itself in the realm of the ‘contemporary’. This was not “through curatorial intention but through a proliferation of performative acts generated by the audience. In expanding the parameters of what constitutes an engagement with art, we might in fact be entertaining an expanded notion of the very nature of participation, of taking part in and of itself”.
“What interests me”, writes Rogoff “is the possibility of reading a response as a form of re-articulating the question of what it might be to take part in public sphere culture”. As Rogoff says, spaces become a possibility that might “accommodate the proliferation of performative acts by which audiences shift themselves from being viewers to being participants”.
All that from a giant legoman.
References
Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press.
Rogoff, I. Looking away – participations in visual culture