The new art school will operate as a cultural cornerstone in its community. It should embed itself in the urban milieu, mine the surrounding offerings, and invite local constituents in to watch. Construction techniques, material selections from the area, the local real estate market, weather patterns, private wealth, and political will should become part of the school as much as internationally acclaimed artists and critics. A local mix will guarantee a long-lasting and supportive environment, regardless of what the architectural expression becomes.
The architecture of a new art school could easily reflect this set of values. Like the museum (and its for-profit half-brother, the commercial gallery), the art school, once considered outside the crass realities of the commercial world, has found itself squarely in the crosshairs of the art market. Curators, dealers, and collectors ply its halls, hoping to discover the Next Big Thing. As with the museum, architecture can be used to attract attention and stake a claim.
Unlike the museum, a school is, by definition, a place of learning, of process as well as product. The architecture of the art school has a unique opportunity to grow out of the intersection of building culture and art education.
The disciplines of the visual arts have traditionally been about the creation of physical things. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture have particular spatial and infrastructural requirements, and work spaces have been defined accordingly: large rooms with solid white walls and ample but indirect light.
The art school must accept new methods of intellectual and physical production without knowing them ahead of time. In addition, presentation spaces not only need to support new methods of display, they must be open to wholesale redefinition. Walls may be a thing of the past
Buildings and spaces can be designed to choreograph access to the public and private spaces of the school in a kind of engineered exposure. Studios, classrooms, galleries, and gathering spaces will be redefined in the process as access and openness become essential physical characteristics of the facility. The art school for the twenty-first century should be a reflection of current art practices, including acknowledgment of the art market, its physical image being informed by the dynamic between the two. The building was to house technology laboratories, artist studios, a wood and metal shop, a recording studio and mixing booth, a television studio, two technology classrooms, a media library, a black-box performance venue, a series of exhibition spaces, a restaurant, and a bookstore. The work made there could range from film and video, dance, performance, and visual art to interactive new media, gaming, and software design. Every conceivable medium and discipline was to be supported by a specific space in the facility.
As the studio loses its time-honoured spatial definition, so too may the spaces of teaching. The cafés, hallways, and lounges of a school may provide as good a setting for the review and discussion of contemporary work as a formal jury space. Schools can be designed to engineer chance encounters between students and faculty and also between the school and the public
