Hasta La Ideas

If you want to receive a formal design education, the obvious choices are to enroll in a four-year undergrad program or a two- to three-year graduate program. But there is an alternative, at least for those of you living in the American Northeast: The Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont.

The nonprofit school teaches certificate courses, workshops, and tutorials in both design and construction ranging from one day to a full semester in length, with courses of multi-week lengths in between. In addition to traditional woodworking and furniture building, students can also pursue courses in sustainable building, energy efficiency and ecosystems. And Yestermorrow’s backbone of design/build courses are hands-on, striving to “demystify the worlds of architecture and carpentry by putting sketching tools and hammers in hand.”

That hands-on approach, and the clear marriage between design and craft, is built into the school’s ethos:

Our curriculum is specifically designed to demystify the designing and building processes using hands-on, experiential learning to teach students the art and wisdom of good design and the skill and savvy of enduring craftsmanship as a single, integrated process.

“If there is a descendent of the Bauhaus today, it might be the Yestermorrow Design/Build School,” Archinect writes, pointing out (see the link) two Yestermorrow professors with a direct educational lineage back to Walter Gropius. Weimar might be gone, but Warren carries on.

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