SCAD Style

Life at an art school is different than life at a state school, and especially just real life in general. On some levels going to SCAD is much more like real life than going to a state school where groups, organizations, and the Greeks dominate student life. Our campus is downtown. Not downtown as in it's a section of land in the downtown area, I mean it IS downtown. All over. SCAD has about 70 buildings scattered throughout the historic district and beyond. The city sidewalks are our thoroughfare to and from classes in other buildings. The city parking garages and street level lots are what we use for parking lots. In that respect, SCAD's students are more in tune with the city they are living in that most college students who live on a traditional campus. And other than professional organizations or academic related group, there is very little extra curricular stuff to do at SCAD. We're all about homework here. Crazy amounts of homework! And lectures from visiting professionals. Everyone gets excited when Design Week happens because the big names show up in town to meet SCAD students and give presentations or have open discussions. Last year I met Frank Gehry. Last quarter I met Joshua Prince-Ramus. That's good stuff!!!

Where am I going with this? My building, Eichberg Hall, houses the School of Building Arts. Within the past year the buildings furnishings have been upgraded significantly. As of last year we were still sitting on nails, oops, I mean studio stools, and using the most beaten up, carved up, unstable drafting tables. It's the SCAD standard. All of the dorms and other buildings have the same torture devices. The problem is that Eichberg is open 24/7 and most students spend pretty much every waking hour in the building when they are not in other classes. People move into their studio spaces. The summer I started here the school put their foot down on bringing your own futon, coffee pot, and microwave to your space. Yes, I am serious.

Since the new furniture was installed this year there's been little need to bring your own furniture other than tool boxes and bookshelves for your own studio space. Even when people would bring their own furniture, generally the chairs were comfy high back $99 specials from Office Depot and not what I saw today. While walking past the first floor computer lab I was reminded that things here are still done the SCAD way when I saw I guy sitting in his own Eames(esque) desk chair. I desperatly wanted to flip it over to see if it had a Herman Miller tag on it because it was close enough to look like the real thing. It's time for me to graduate if this is going to be part of the scene here. This is so far from reality!