Art Education and the Built Environment

Presented at a conference organized by Hong Kong Baptist University

From the beginning of 2007 until the summer of 2017, I was involved in the development, design and construction of a new campus for Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. (This article is published in association with The Centre for Transdisciplinary Studies at Emily Carr.

Those ten years taught me a great deal about the many different ways in which communities work, define themselves and imagine their own futures. This short presentation will look at the process of design and the development of a model that reflected the perceived needs of the community for which the campus was built. This will then be the basis for examining a post-Covid-19 strategy devoted to learning, reconciliation and engagement in art education.  

In the early stages of the campus project, a small group of planners from Emily Carr and some external consultants became ethnographers, seeking to understand the complexity and diversity of expectations among members of the university community for a project of this scope and size. The goal was to involve the community in a broad-based consultation that would then be reflected in the physical design of the new campus. 

During one phase over a period of 24 months, 268 meetings were held which included faculty, students, staff, alumni and administration. The architects also participated. At another point, in order to better understand the existing campus, another eighty or so meetings were held. This information gathering period informed the specifications and design of the future campus. Both series of meetings were an opportunity for people to get to know each other and witness and participate in creative and discursive engagements around new ideas for the built environment in learning and education.

There were eight principles which emerged from this process. 

1. Students at the Centre with an emphasis on diversity, inclusion, reconciliation and pedagogical innovation. To make this a visible goal, we decided that the core of the new campus would have an Aboriginal Gathering Place at the heart of the main floor from which other areas would radiate. We created a two-level library and learning commons across the hall from the Gathering Place in order to encourage those two areas to speak to each other about knowledge, exchange and community.

2. Bringing the Public In: Emily Carr Values at the Core which was about being inviting and accessible and breaking down barriers between the university and its communities. This principle was developed to acknowledge and promote: respect for diversity of cultures and indigenous practices; creativity and experimentation; support for lifelong learning; and social and environmental sustainability.

Remember, these were just two of the eight principles and yet they revealed a great deal about intent, potential design and desired outcomes on the part of the community, with a focus on pedagogy and innovation. These principles were not developed in a vacuum. They were tied to a process of consultation which went far beyond the conventional approaches used to survey members of a community or hold public meetings for projects of this nature and scope.

There are six other principles which I will list and could become the focus of further discussion: 

3. Closer to Home

4. Making and Remaking

5. 21st Century infrastructure

6. Access and Diversity

7. Visibility and Transparency

8. Creative work everywhere

Now, I consider these principles to be a reflection of the “state of mind” of the university community at a point in time when conventional divisions and disagreements were slightly less weighty and there was a convergence of concerns, interests and goals among a diverse and deeply committed group of institutional members including students.

Suffice to say, the process of discussion was often rocky and challenging. There were worries the community’s needs would not be fulfilled. There were financial challenges and fund-raising was difficult. The budget for new campus was cut by twenty percent when the government decided to take a look and reevaluate all of its capital investments. There is much more detail here, but rather than focus on these challenges, I want to mention how solid the community remained throughout this period.  

There was the sense and appreciation of the fact that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There was a strong desire to use this opportunity to find out as much as possible about what disciplines shared as opposed to what differentiated them, what students, faculty and staff shared and how our diverse communities both inside and outside the school could inform decision-making.

There was excitement about reinventing the look, feel and functionality of studios, labs and classrooms. There was interest and support for a welcoming theatre and main gallery that would reflect the values of the university. Most of all, community members were looking for intimacy and openness both with each other and with the public in the design. Questions arose about the nature, intention and effect of art schools. There were discussions about the built environment, flexibility and putting in many internal windows to encourage visibility and transparency among disciplines.

I mention these characteristics because at this particular point in time, they reflected the outlook and philosophy of the community.

There was another level to this relatively utopian and hopeful outlook. It was the strong desire for the disciplines to change, to connect with greater depth to each other, to rid the university of the silos that had been built up and importantly, to create a space where new disciplines could be invented and then developed. There was a genuine desire to reinvent ourselves. For those of us who have been in universities for decades, this was an exciting development with the potential for renewal. At one point, I suggested the design be four floors, completely open without walls, that would allow for the disciplines to mix and students from different areas to learn from each other and from the work they were pursuing. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.  

Institutions, I believe, have a set of characteristics and modes of teaching and learning that are reproduced from generation to generation. Change happens slowly. Emily Carr was built as a studio school in the nineteenth century tradition with an emphasis on craft and hands-on learning. It evolved from a college to an institute to a university. In all instances, studio practices remained at the heart of the school’s pedagogy and creativity. In terms of context and location, it has continuously sustained cultural activity on the west coast of Canada. It has been a hub of cultural innovation in Canada as a whole. The new campus was designed to celebrate these achievements and bring history to bear in charting a path to a new future while retaining some of its most important traditions.

The campus opened in August 2017, following a monumental job of packing and moving an entire institution from its previous location. When the building opened, staff, faculty and students walked around in a daze, overwhelmed by the light, the grandeur of the building, the sense of renewal. There were of course many challenges and deficiencies that needed to be overcome. For the most part, these issues were met with vigour and joy and a solution-driven attitude.

This brief introduction to a shared achievement highlights how community members are defined by their heterogeneity and that it is possible, should always be possible to find common ground. After a few months in the new campus, however, many faults in the design, layout and functionality were found. Within the short space of a year, all the conflicting visions for the school came into the foreground and unity frayed. The meetings we had held were forgotten.  

Over time, conventional and some unsuspected errors in the construction contributed to differences of opinion and challenges about the use of space, who was prioritized and who felt marginalized. Some issues were minor. Others were major. Openness, a value agreed upon by the community prior to construction, quickly changed and divisions appeared. Curtains and other coverings were draped across internal windows. Open studio spaces were rebuilt to divide into small private spaces. Broad hallways were narrowed for lockers. Shared faculty offices were disparaged. Open spaces were enclosed. 

So, our consultation process and implementation revealed something very important. Some years earlier, we had captured a moment in time, a community at one particular instant in its history. However, the very term community suggests continual evolution, change and adaptation. Communications within communities change quickly and sometimes dramatically as do priorities and plans. This inherent instability is what keeps communities and crucially communications within and among communities working. But we had been unable to account for this in the planning. Fluidity, instability, fuzziness are not terms governments or construction companies understand. Architects are very aware of these elements but few buildings are by their nature insecure, unsure, or hesitant about their purpose. They are built for stability, durability and longevity, not for the contingencies that arrive with habitation. The same could be said in a general sense for universities which are not homeostatic. They are dynamic and the arrival of new generations of students every September intensifies the instability. These are not negative characteristics but they increase the burden on faculty and staff and demand adaptability and flexibility when that may not be possible all the time. Most importantly, they throw into relief how challenging it is to change the core values of institutions even those more conscious of their history and impact.

Now, introduce Covid-19 into this evolving complexity of community building and without a chance to discuss transitional processes, the very foundations of university education were thrown into question. For example, we moved very quickly from the exploration of the potential of a new campus to questioning the usefulness, in the general sense, of the built environment.  

Universities benefit from the fact that new generations of students arrive and then spend four years learning as much about the culture of the institution as they do about its purpose. They are agents of acculturation and become acculturated as well. Rightfully, they demand accountability and clarity. They want the facilities and technologies to be up to date. They expect the learning and teaching process to be of the highest quality. They anticipate friendship, conflict, camaraderie and engagement. The new campus had been built to meet those expectations but not in a context where students cannot not attend and where the organization of space had been contested so quickly.

When Covid-19 arrived, learning and teaching were necessarily re-contextualized and compressed into and onto video screens. We are learning a great deal about the limitations and potential of two-dimensional worlds. I have been exploring how complex the normal communications process is. Transpose this to screen-based worlds or image worlds and the challenges increase exponentially. The context for learning has shifted from the built environment to a fluid and increasingly complex hybrid of multiple spaces, places and times. The implications of this for the future of interaction in education are huge. It is possible, though, that the online world which is the one Generation Z knows best will become the basis for learning and not just be an add-on. At the same time, we will have to recast what we mean by interpersonal interaction and recognize that the ground rules have changed.

The new campus was built to encourage informal learning which I hope will be now be more fully recognized for its ubiquity and importance. This should engender an appreciation of the flexible time sequences that meld the informal and the formal into learning constellations. Schedules for learning will have to accommodate the fluidity of the informal. But the new campus was not built for remote learning. Neither were our houses.

Informal learning cannot be fit into a schedule and hopefully, the school day will now be recognized as more than a collection of classes. In fact, the entire issue of time management needs revision and reinvention and we have been offered an amazing opportunity to re-envisage when and where learning takes place.  

At the same time, a chat room is not like a lounge or a cafeteria. There is less chance for serendipity and accidental encounters and discussions. The notion of the agora is difficult to reproduce on-screen. The on-line world is driven by exchanges of information with an emphasis on lecturing and cannot match the complexity of in-person encounters governed by as many unconscious as conscious human cues and signals. The post Covid university will have to grapple with some of these concerns and look for new interactive notions of presence irrespective of place. Our very ideas about space will necessarily change.  

I have also been thinking a great deal about voice and how challenging it is to listen online. Voice is also about difference and diversity, about hearing the unexpected and cluing into subtleties of expression both linguistic and non-verbal. The on-line world cannot match or duplicate inter-personal encounters of the sort I am discussing. So, will we be able to retain some of the experimental aspects of in-person learning? In general, how experimental can we be? Will assessment change and will we be looking for different qualities and outcomes from media-based interactions balanced by in-person encounters? Will customization be the norm and how will that be accomplished? Will customization be the demand and where will the resources come from to achieve that outcome?

Most of all, what kinds of communities are we now focused on establishing? Students have always learned a great deal from each other. How can that be encouraged online? How does assessment fit into all of this? What values will be attached to credentials? What are the differences between online credits and in-person credits? Do these distinctions matter?

As I mentioned before, communities are both fragile and resilient. Their flexibility is their strength. But they depend on continual engagement, interaction, some degree of predictability, the sense that people know what is going on and why, transparency and accountability, and the feeling constituents will be heard. Learning during Covid cannot only be about consumption. It is also about contestation and to what degree something pre-packaged for online consumption be contested?  

Ultimately, questions about community are also questions about the social self, language and meaning. Any collectivity is shaped by both the implicit and the explicit, by distinctiveness and sharing, and by the convergence of individual needs with community expectations and demands. The challenge will be how to navigate these levels of complexity while engaging with diverse outlooks and personal and shared histories. We have entered a period when the contingent aspects of human interaction will help define the relational map of institutional engagement and when questions of when to learn will be replaced by learning as part of a continuum, neither defined by the built environment nor completely outside of it. Autonomy will become more of a value as long as it is attached to commitment and experimentation. The classroom will have no walls. At last.