RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 03.02 Nature City proposal by WORKac, for MoMA’s exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, opening February 2012
A Conversation with Joe Scanlan, Fritz Haeg, and Dan Wood
JOE SCANLAN: I just saw a picture of the proposed classroom for your Atelier course, a big, orange expedition tent placed smack in the middle of the New South lawn. It’s very compelling! It feels like a spaceship has landed, or explorers have arrived to begin extended research into this strange culture known as a university campus. Is that how it feels to you, preparing for this course. Are you embarking on an expedition? FRITZ HAEG: Yes, I really like that analogy to an expedition. An initial motivation for this project was to depart from the confines of conventional academic architecture. The privileged space of the academic environment is always interior: classrooms, libraries, studios, offices, dining halls, dormitories, etc. The non-interior spaces are typically residual left-over in-between spaces that are, at best, just meant to be pretty, ornamental, or recreational. So, yes, this project is like embarking on an expedition in a location that is both very familiar and unknown, very visible, but unseen. Did you ever pitch a tent in your backyard when you were a kid? Maybe it’s a bit like that....similar motivations to explore, find your own space, and to temporarily escape the institutional structures. JS: It sounds like you want to harness this space—put it under glass, so to speak—and see what it might reveal. We often talk about how college students learn as much through informal socializing as they do in formal classroom settings. The conversations that follow a seminar down the hall and out of the building might be more illuminating than the seminar itself. That has certainly been my experience, especially in my studio seminars, where confused and halting class discussions sometimes produce a flurry of studio activity. It is as if the information needs a different, less structured outlet in order to be manifested. Has that been your experiences? DAN WOOD: I am not sure that a focus on the “informal” doesn’t in a way trivialize the experiences and interactions that we hope to foster. In fact, some of the events, installations, and discussions that come out of this informal setting and arrange may, in fact, be quite organized, strident and “formal”—just self-generated and perhaps outside of the mainstream of the educational experience. For me, it is more a question of the “peripheral” that you are really describing, which is really at the heart of any creative venture. As we all know, the best ideas often come to us at the very moment we are thinking or doing something else. I think the kind of enforced peripherality that we are encouraging may indeed be a real source of inspiration and creativity.
FH: Yes, certainly, and that was in fact one of and so much better. I’m sure that’s happened to the fundamental aspects of the first season each of us, no? But it begs the question: How of the Sundown Schoolhouse, which I initiated do you set up and sustain a peripheral zone at my home in Los Angeles in 2006. Through the of creativity without it becoming the center? 12-week term, nine students visited for one How do you imagine the class maintaining that entire day a week from 8am until 8pm. In addispirit of being on the edge, so to speak? tion to our time spent with a wide range of DW: I was thinking more that the class is to visiting teachers, we shared morning movement set to be—in every possible way—peripheral to and yoga, prepared and ate all of our meals the larger institution. We will be outside, together, washed the dishes, cleaned up, and first of all, all the time, in direct conended the day with a social hour when friends trast with any typical class. (In February, were welcome to stop by and hang out. Of course this sense of being “outside” of the typical it was those moments between the supposedly learning environment will be very noticeprivileged formal school-time of focused disable I think!) Second, the class will be workcussion, when things settled—relaxing a bit, ing directly with existing student-run groups re-entering the quotidian, making connections— on campus, who already operate outside of the and some really essential dialogue emerged. proscribed activities and endeavors of the JS: I don’t normally have extended experiUniversity. Lastly, Fritz and I are working ences like that with my students, unless we to bring a number of speakers from outside of are on a field trip. One of the best class Princeton to engage the class in a series of discussions we ever had took place in a rented discussions about self-organization, activism, Buick LeSabre on our way back from a visit to creativity etc. Fritz himself, of course, is Dia:Beacon. (And yes, you can fit an entire not a member of our school and I think the very advanced sculpture class in a Buick LeSabre.) presence of all of the people working in wildly Still, twelve hours sounds like either a lot different contexts will inevitably lead to a of yoga, a lot of cooking and eating, or a lot lot of discussion and thinking outside of the of cleaning up. What other kinds of topics traditional Princeton box… would bubble up for discussion in between these FH: Yes, and perhaps the most fertile by-proddescribed events? uct of positioning ourselves outside of the FH: Most of the apparent focus of the confines of the established infrastructure is Schoolhouse days was on the regular series of that we will also become extremely visible, visiting teachers we had coming through—over inserting ourselves into the public realm of 24 of them from a variety of disciplines, over the University and student life. So much of the course of the 12 weeks. So we still did have what happens in the classrooms and studios that concentrated time with a teacher—but my remains hidden and invisible. This will be hope was to create an environment where the quite the opposite. students were in charge and at home, and it was the teachers who were visiting them on their Dan Wood and Fritz Haeg are teaching an Atelier own turf. And because each visitor spent relastudio in the Spring semester. The Atelier program tively little time with us, the core relationin Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts brings ships were student to student, not student to professional artists to campus for intensive teacher. In that way the dialog that emerged between the students could continue through collaborative work with students and faculty. the rest of our activities in a continual flow Proposed Atelier construction, from breakfast in the Princeton campus site, spring 2012 morning to happy hour at the end of the day, with the visitor there to continually redirect things. JS: Dan, your characterization of the peripheral reminds me of something the artist David Hammons once said, about how he feels his best work happens on the way to the studio rather than in the studio. And even once he’s there, the “big” piece he’s working on is getting all overworked and uptight, while some little thing he might do while talking on the phone or making tea would be freer,
03.02 p.01