MetropolisMag.com monthly contributor Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson suggests that Baltimore art students would do well to leave campus and seek out the myriad sources of inspiration in the city.
An excerpt from the blog reads:
For as long as I can remember, designers and educators in Baltimore have invoked the name of the
Rural Studio. They looked south to Hale County and wondered how to adapt Mockbee's full-immersion program for design students in an urban setting like Baltimore. The conversations were, pardon the pun, purely academic. In spite of a high number of colleges and universities in the region�with several programs in architecture, planning, and landscape design�curricula rarely called for students to venture beyond the quadrangle (save for the requisite study-abroad programs).
There were barriers in getting students off the campus, most of them perceived and not wholly accurate. The belief was that it wasn't safe "out there" and using the real world as a classroom was hazardous. I remember chatting with one frustrated professor at Johns Hopkins about this a few years back. He was politely told he should not encourage students to take public transportation for a class project lest "something should happen."
This insular stance resulted in a real deficit of academic and applied research on urban issues in this city. Other schools of architecture have successfully developed urban lab models, creating reciprocal relationships with city government and community groups. Schools like Carnegie Mellon and its Urban Studio. If it could happen in Pittsburgh, then why not here?
Read the entire article here.