College of Connections
Architecture Minnesota, Jan/Feb 2009

The University of Minnesota's recently formed College of Design, which drew together the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel, is a work in progress. But one outcome is already clear: Its students and faculty have embraced the new culture of interdisciplinary learning and collaboration, and they're eager to use their broader design perspective to change the world.

Architects design buildings. Therefore architecture schools should teach their students how to design the best buildings, right?

Actually, it's not that simple, especially at the University of Minnesota, where the relatively new College of Design (CDes) is expanding the definition of architectural instruction. “I gravitated toward design,” says CDes student Kristin Helle, “because I knew it was a way for me to do three things: to solve problems, to be creative, and to serve people.” Not much about architecture there, which is fitting, because Helle isn't studying architecture. She completed her M.F.A in Interactive Design in 2008 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Design Communication.

Helle is emblematic of today's CDes students, whose backgrounds are not always tailor-made for their chosen fields and who are often more interested in broader societal and environmental ideas than in the design of individual projects. Recently, Architecture Minnesota brought five students from four different programs together and asked them why they were attracted to the college, how they felt about its interdisciplinary focus, and what they hoped to accomplish with their degrees. The students seemed at ease with each other, even though some had never met, and there was none of the stereotypical design-school hierarchy that puts architecture at the top and other design avenues on lower rungs.  But most striking was how articulately the five expressed their deeply held views about culture, the environment, and a designer’s responsibility in the wider world.  

After our wide-ranging conversation with the students, we visited studios and classrooms on both the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses and spoke with faculty from a variety of programs.  Generally speaking, faculty members see the students' acute interest in global humanitarian design as a somewhat recent and very exciting development. All the students and faculty we talked to enthusiastically echoed Helle’s aspiration of serving people through creative problem solving, and all felt the broadly interdisciplinary College of Design could -- and should -- facilitate that.


New Opportunities

The College of Design officially formed in 2006 through a merger of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (CALA) in Rapson Hall on the East Bank campus and the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel (DHA) in McNeal Hall on the St. Paul campus. The new college brings together architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, graphic design, housing studies, clothing design, and retail merchandising. It was years in the making and it’s still, in many ways, like a new relationship: the two halves exploring their own boundaries, discovering what the other has to offer, and deciding how much of themselves to give up. CDes Dean Thomas Fisher, Assoc. AIA, believes the merger is a natural one because the disciplines, though diverse, all speak similar languages and hope for similar outcomes: better ideas with positive impacts. But what, honestly, does architecture have in common with clothing design?

Marc Swackhamer would know. The assistant professor of architecture is currently working with a colleague in Houston on prototypical multi-functional wall prototypes. Because of the many roles these walls must play -- structure, storage, ventilation, daylighting, and insulation, to name a few – Swackhamer regularly collaborates with biologists, chemical engineers, aerospace engineers, computer scientists, and, yes, professors over on the St. Paul campus. Case in point: In 2007, he developed the Drape Wall/Cloak Wall prototype for the College of Design's “Here by Design III” exhibition, at the invitation of curator and graphic design professor James Boyd-Brent. The apparel link?  Swackhamer produced the piece with clothing design faculty Missy Bye and Karen LaBat on that department's apparel welder. The Drape Wall/Cloak Wall went on to win an R+D Award from Architect Magazine – an achievement made possible by new academic relationships.

Swackhamer is not alone in making new connections. The School of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture have been offering joint studios. The University of Minnesota's Solar Decathlon team (see below) includes representatives of five of the seven CDes departments. Graphic-design professor Steven McCarthy has been bringing students to Rapson Hall to use the automated laser cutter there. Last year the college set up a McNeal Hall visit for a group of architecture students interested in learning from clothing designers how patterns are made and produced. And a new program in product design, currently in the planning stages, will merge design, engineering, and business, effectively pushing collaboration out into the greater University.

“I find an eagerness among students,” says Kate Solomonson, associate dean of Academic Affairs, “to learn about and connect with other fields. We are seeing the beginning of modifications to our curricula, but that’s a slower process than student curiosity.” But Shengyin Xu, an M.S. in Sustainable Design student and Solar Decathlon team leader, says the curriculum has been important, too. “It is nice that we get to take classes outside our field,” she says. “My old school had a very modernist pedagogy: This is the architect who designs the building and everyone has to look at it because it's pretty. It was good to switch to a more integrated approach to design.”

Xu recently took a housing-studies class that looked at public housing in Chicago and elsewhere. “I learned,” she says, “that design can do a lot, but there are limitations, and you need to think about the other realms – cultural aspects, policy, funding -- before talking about a solution.  That experience has helped me see how you can use design in a more ethical way.”

A Social and Environmental Focus

Xu's observations touch on another concept that was widely embraced during our sit-down with the students. Call it humanitarianism, altruism, sustainability, or something else; it is the idea that design exists not for the glory of the designer (Xu's “modernist pedagogy”) but for the benefit of others. CDes students have participated in service trips to Malawi, where they mapped and designed new campuses for the University of Livingstonia, and to Biloxi, where they created a “solar-powered, rainwater-harvesting, water-filtering, self-composting urban farming machine.”

“Architects and designers can affect people's everyday lives,” says architecture student Craig Hutchison. “Everyone in the middle class goes to school, works in an office, lives in a city. These are areas where architects have the most potential influence. It’s no longer high end residential construction that has the most relevance.” But residential construction can matter, too, says Helle. Last year she served as a research assistant for a project that dealt with refugee and immigrant housing. “Residential space is very important in terms of cultural identity and transition,” she explains. “Minnesota is undergoing massive changes culturally, so how do we serve our Somali population or the needs of Native Americans? How do we allow them to be who they are inside their homes?”

And then there's the environment. “We have a responsibility,” Hutchison emphasizes, “to let people who occupy our buildings know they’re part of a natural system. A city, even, is a part of the larger ecology.” Landscape architecture student Zach Jorgensen agrees, describing his program’s focus on looking beyond the site to the wider region. Then he circles back to the interdisciplinary nature of the college. “I think the crossing over of classes,” he says, “really helps with an understanding of sustainability. Seeing how architects deal with it, seeing how land-use planners deal with it: that really broadens the experience.”

The Next Challenge

There is, unfortunately, a barrier to true interdisciplinary study and collaboration at the College of Design: the miles that separate Rapson Hall and McNeal Hall. “Our biggest hurdle,” says Swackhamer, “is a logistical one: getting the St. Paul departments onto the Minneapolis campus. It's amazing how many collaborative projects start out as discussions around the water cooler.” Both the dean and associate dean agree. Solomonson laments the fact that McNeal Hall offers less public space for the display of student work.  Fisher says physical proximity is the ultimate goal, but he suggests that the slower merger of the departments might ensure a stronger college in the long run, because it allows relationships to develop in their own way. “I have found that, in communities, slower change can be better because it happens more organically,” he says.

So what's being done to bridge the gap? For starters, the university has identified the Bell Museum – a stone's throw from Rapson -- as a second building for the college once the museum moves to a new site. (The bad news: Funding for a new Bell is partially dependent on action at the state legislature.) How the various departments would occupy the two buildings has not yet been determined. In the meantime, suggests graphic-design professor McCarthy, a swap might be in order, in which the departments “populate each others' spaces.” Fisher, for one, does have offices on both campuses.

Despite the distance, cross-pollination of departments is already well under way, and, judging by the students' more holistic, more altruistic approach to design, it will only increase. At the heart of the College of Design is the fundamental idea that design -- whether for clothing, interiors, graphics, landscapes, buildings, or products -- can make a difference. And make a difference not just for the few that can afford it, but for everyone, and without harming the earth. “Our students,” says Fisher, summing up the sentiments of Helle and the others, “feel they have a responsibility to the more than six billion people on the planet, as well as to the planet itself.”

But all is not leafy green in the real world, and the students recognize that, too. “I have been a little disappointed that designers have to talk about sustainability as a goal,” says architecture student John Steingraeber. He knows that care for the environment and those that live on it should be inherent in good design—but often isn’t. He offers a statement that could easily serve as a mantra for this new design thinking—or a slogan for the college: “Form is part of performance.”