Hasta La Ideas

News: the Royal College of Art will end up as a “Chinese finishing school” unless the UK government does more to encourage young people to study art and design, according to writer and broadcaster Andrew Marr.

Marr said the RCA, which this week celebrates its 175th anniversary, was set up by the government to counter the threat of economic decline caused by high-quality goods from overseas markets, but feared politicians today failed to appreciate the importance of design education.

“Design doesn’t feature on new models of the core curriculum,” Marr writes on the BBC’s website. “Art colleges are under the financial cosh. You’d almost get the impression that Westminster [the home of UK government] and Albertopolis [the swathe of South Kensington in London where the Royal College of Art is located] are now different planets.”

This Monday, Marr hosted a special edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 to celebrate the RCA’s 175th anniversary with guests including former RCA rector and Arts Council chair Sir Christopher Frayling.

In the show, Frayling pointed out that the creative industries provided twice as many UK jobs as financial services, but that this contribution went unnoticed.

“What I never understand is, there are so many column inches about financial services all the time,” Frayling told Marr. “Financial services contributes about 1% more than the creative industries, which employ two million people whereas financial services employ one million people. So in terms of contribution to the economy generally, the creative industries actually have it over financial services in almost every way. And how many column inches about it? Very little. So there’s this huge impact but people don’t seem to be noticing.”

In his article, Marr argues that because the economic value of art schools is difficult to measure, politicians fail to appreciate their importance to the economy.

“And there’s where I think the trouble lies,” Marr concludes. “To invest in art and design means putting public money into areas whose value cannot be captured on a spreadsheet, where concepts like productivity, value-for-money, inputs and outputs – which so reassure the political world – simply collapse. That means faith. It means risk.

“But, without it, hard times surely stretch out rather bleakly. Other countries understand this, including China where more than a thousand art and design colleges are operating and whose students greatly benefit from colleges here too.

“If we don’t do more to encourage our young people to art and design, Frayling tells me, the RCA will find itself simply ‘a Chinese finishing school’.”

During the radio show, Frayling pointed out that the fears over economic decline that led to the foundation of the RCA were similar to contemporary fears. “There was a select committee looking at manufactures and our exports and our balance of payments and they looked at French silk and wallpaper and they looked at industrial design in Prussia and Bavaria and they said what could we do to improve the quality of design for manufacture?” Frayling said.

He added: “And they also said why is there this snobbery about applied arts? Why are we so good at luxury goods and not so good at mass manufactured goods? So they set up the Government School of Design, which is the origin of public sector art education in this country.”

Andrew Marr is one of the UK’s foremost political writers and broadcasters and is former editor of The Independent.

See all our stories about the Royal College of Art »

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This factory-like building by architects Haworth Tompkins is the new home for print-making and photography at the Royal College of Art in London.

Named after British industrial designer and entrepreneur James Dyson, the Dyson Building also contains an innovation wing where start-up designers can launch their businesses.

At the heart of the building is a factory-like production room, referred to as the ‘machine hall’, which is filled with large printing machines and layout spaces.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

All the departments are arranged around this triple-height space and glass walls let students look across to see what’s going on in other studios.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

“What’s most successful is the way you can see everywhere,” architect Graham Haworth told Dezeen at the opening party.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

He went on describe the contrast between this building and the RCA’s 1960s Darwin Building, where “all the floors are stacked up on top of each other” and explained how Haworth Tompkins had tried to avoid this. ”We pushed the idea of a creative factory,” he said. “Just like Andy Warhol’s factory, a place of visible art production.”

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

Raw concrete walls and surfaces recur throughout the building, which the architects hope will become gradually marked with traces of paint, glue, and other materials used by students.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

An exhibition room lines the building’s street-facing facade and a 220-seat lecture hall is located on the first floor.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

Now the project is complete, the architects are working on another building for the RCA, which will eventually link up with the Dyson Building and extend the length of the central hall.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

Haworth Tompkins also designed the Sackler Building, which accommodates the RCA’s painting school and is located next door.

Above: photograph is by Helene Binet

See more stories about the Royal College of Art here, including a series of movies we filmed at this year’s degree show.

Photography is by Philip Vile, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from the Royal College of Art:

Royal College of Art officially opens The Dyson Building in Battersea

The Royal College of Art, the world’s leading postgraduate art and design university and now in its 175th year, has opened a new academic building as part of a £61 million masterplan.

The Dyson building is named in honour of the British industrial designer, inventor and entrepreneur whose educational charity, the James Dyson Foundation, donated £5 million to support the development.

Designed by award-winning architects Haworth Tompkins, it is the most significant new development for the College since it moved to Kensington Gore in 1962 and will form the centre-piece of the RCA’s Battersea campus alongside the RCA’s existing Painting and Sculpture buildings.

It will connect with and provide a huge boost for ‘Creative Battersea’, which currently boasts the headquarters of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, architects Will Alsop, Foster + Partners and the re-development of the Battersea power station site.

The building is home to the Printmaking and Photography programmes, providing state of the art facilities and studios for nearly 100 Master’s, Mphil and PhD students, as well as new offices for InnovationRCA, the College’s business incubator unit.

There is also a 220-seat lecture theatre and a gallery space which will be open to the public for talks and exhibitions, including the hugely popular RCA Secret postcard exhibition and sale which will re-locate to the Dyson building in March 2013.

For the first time in the College’s history all four fine art programmes will be based on one site, leading to a dynamic new synergy between the disciplines, and an exciting new chapter in the furtherance of the College’s fine art research.

Exploded block drawing – click above for larger image

The building is conceived as a creative ‘factory’ both in the industrial sense (as a place of industry), and through the reference to Andy Warhol’s Factory as a place of art production. An open, central ‘machine hall’ forms the heart of the building, designed to house the large printing machines used by students and technical staff to make work.

Site plan – click above for larger image

Centred around this space are the studios, offices and workshop facilities.

Section model – click above for larger image

A key characteristic of the RCA’s success is the fluid relationship between programmes. The building has been designed to create ‘horizontal drift’ between disciplines, and the creative processes take place in highly visible proximity to one another.

Section – click above for larger image

The cross-fertilisation of ideas that is present and encouraged on the programmes is also enhanced through the additional inclusion of InnovationRCA within the main building, blurring the boundary between the academic and the commercial.

Section – click above for larger image

InnovationRCA provides business support and incubation services to help students and graduates protect and commercialise pioneering design-led technologies successfully.

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Designer Marguerite Humeau has reconstructed the vocal tracts of prehistoric creatures to capture the shrieks and grunts they might have made (+ slideshow + movie).

Vocal tracts are made from soft tissue so they do not fossilise, meaning that Humeau had to speculate on what the surrounding tissue would have been like by analysing bones from the head, neck and chest areas of fossilised animals.

Scans of elephants, wild boars, dolphins and porpoises – the closest living relatives to the three extinct species Humeau chose to recreate – also helped to map the probable shape of the vocal tracts.

Humeau contacted dozens of experts, including palaeontologists, zoologists, veterinarians, engineers, explorers, surgeons, ear and throat specialists and radiologists, to help her work out the designs.

She produced models of each extinct animal’s likely resonance cavities, larynx, vocal cords and windpipe, and recorded the sounds that each animal might have made.

The first version of the project was presented for her graduation from London’s Royal College of Art last year.

The initial project recreated the sounds of the extinct Imperial Mammoth, and was then expanded to include Ambulocetus, known as the prehistoric ‘walking whale’, and Entelodont, known as the ‘terminator pig’.

The models have now been presented as part of an installation and performance at the Politique Fiction exhibition at Cité du Design in Saint-Étienne, France.

The movie is by Ben Penna and sound is by Association Phonotonic. Photographs are by Felipe Ribon.

Here’s some more information from the designer:

Proposal for Resuscitating Prehistoric Creatures sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era.

The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims to resuscitate the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tracts. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilise. The only things that have been preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned.

Humeau had to overcome the difficulty of telling history and prehistory, and also to create a work from non-existent, inaccessible or lost data. Design, fiction, science, speculations and phantasms serve the project ambition. Advice from experts as well as predictions were used to craft the roars of the new creatures. The epic, as real as fantasised, gives birth to three semi-real roaring creatures: a Mammoth Imperator, an Entelodont aka Terminator Pig, and an Ambulocetus “walking whale”.

From the exhibition curator Alexandra Midal:

Marguerite Humeau graduated from the interactive design department of the Royal College of Art in London in 2011. She resurrects the sounds made by prehistoric animals by reconstructing their vocal chords. This task is not easy when you realise that no fossils of these non-bone parts exist. For months, she conducted a dialogue with palaeontologists, zoologists, veterinary experts, engineers, explorers, surgeons, doctors and radiologists. Far from being a backward looking and romantic work, on the contrary she is carried along by the desire to feel the physical presence of these animals from another time.

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Royal College of Art graduate James Thompson cast the spaces between objects in the college cafe and used the resulting shapes to make furniture-like sculptures.

Thompson mapped the spaces between objects like armchairs and pool tables using Jesmonite, which is typically deployed to create decorative mouldings.

The resulting sculptures are mounted on wooden structures to resemble a new interior based on the same spatial relationships.

Thompson graduated from the college’s Design Products course and Parallel Architecture is on display at Show RCA 2012 until 1 July.

Last week we published a movie with Design Products course leader Tord Boontje giving a tour of the show – watch it here.

See more stories from Show RCA 2012 »

Here’s more information from the designer:

My work deals with our perception of space and its interpretation. My approach draws inspiration from the description of space in cubism and the potential duality of space and time, composed of parallel worlds and higher dimensions that exist alongside our own. Documentation is a key feature of my work, used as a working methodology and an outcome itself, evidenced through the creation of a tools and a systems used to record, re-map and translate a given space into something else.

Parallel Architectures:

Design a system that can be used to document and re-map a particular space and time, to define new interior pieces. The work uses the current formation of a space, the RCafe at the RCA, as the start point to build a functional parallel interior, from that space, for that space.

Cast jesmonite paths map the space, illustrating distance by creating connections between objects, these connections relay on each other for support, they cannot stand alone. The casts used describe space at that particular time and are used to influence to shape of the other, parallel re-constructed space they will become. In the re-constructed space these negative in-betweens are then filled and populated to bridge this gap and give new function to this empty space.

Movie: the final tour we filmed at this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show features projects from the Architecture course including a high-rise hotel growing tropical fruit and an insect-powered office tower.

Above: Data Harvest by Christopher Green

Professor of Architecture Alex de Rijke introduces the course and presents student Louis Hall’s investigation into the way cities develop around motorway infrastructure and the effects major corporations might have on the built environment.

Above: HOT-el by Amanda Callaghan

De Rijke also talks about Haiwai Xie’s model for low-rise, high-density living in London modelled on a Chinese neighbourhood.

Above: Good Intentions by Louis Hall

Student Christopher Green describes his design for a high-rise office building that would cultivate insects both as a sustainable food source and a method for storing data within the structure.

Above: ‘BRIC’ house by Haiwai Xie

De Rijke, of UK firm dRMM, took over as dean of the School of Architecture in September 2011 following the retirement of Nigel Coates, as reported on Dezeen Wire.

The show continues until 1 July and you can see all our stories about the work exhibited here, plus tours of Design Products, Design Interactions and Innovation Design Engineering.