REALM OF IVY
SPATIAL DESIGN/FURNITURE DESIGN | FALL 2021
Instructor: William Virgil; Partner: Zhao Mu; Software: Zbrush, Cinema 4D, Rhino
This project looks at the changing role of the classroom within the unraveling of a devastating pandemic. We enter this class at a moment when the world grapples with questions about the role of the classroom and how much access or lack thereof each institution, city, and country has. Millions of kids are engaging in a completely different model of education, one absolutely challenged by endless constraints, including social, technological, physical, and ethical issues.
We begin by designing the new classroom and zoom out to design a full elementary school. Our reference to this method of close-up and zoom-out is the movie ‘The Powers of Ten’ created by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977. The intention is to work through scalar changes in order to navigate the project at all scales, understanding that interiority and exteriority are intermingled into a single narrative.
Chair detail
During the last ten to twenty years, a lot of American public schools have been closed. Studies in the 1980s and 1990s indicated worsening academic standards and scores. The lack of funding and ever-shifting standards and reforms led to the closure of staggering numbers of schools. Over a hundred schools have been closed since 2002 in New York City alone, and in the 2009–2010 fiscal year, Detroit closed 73 of the 172 school buildings it had left. Other metropolitan areas, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, followed similar courses.
In the article Dismantling the Dream: The Closure of American Public Schools, the author Matthew Christopher states that the legacy of the 20th century is slowly but surely being erased, and what it is being replaced by is not a system but rather an absence of one.
The notion of scalar change is the focus of the class, from small items at the scale of furniture, to large scale work on the context and site in the city.
The “ivy” grows from outdoor to indoor, extracting water from the environment and transferring it into the classroom for planting. Connecting more with nature, kids will learn more botanical and agronomic knowledge.
When people are absent, plants regain control. There is sort of a power in them. They grow and change forms to adapt the site from outdoor to indoor. They bring vitality to the abandoned architecture. We hope to use this form of combination, a rejuvenating ivy to redefine the image of Public Schools.
