The graduate student lounge on the art department floor of the Fine Arts Center looks pretty much the way you'd expect it to: utilitarian, well-worn. Furnishings include a dingy rust-velvet couch, a grid of pigeonholes for students' mail, and a bulletin board papered with notices for summer programs and sublets.
In one corner of this fluorescent-lighted concrete box, however, is a floor-to-ceiling rectangle of glass. This slice of view in the foreground, the planes and angles of the FAC's eggshell-colored exterior walls and stairs; beyond them, the pond, trees, and library is a pleasant visual surprise, an updated Renaissance landscape. Taken together, the room and the window rather neatly represent the successes and limitations of the entire building's design.
What design can do and should do, and how those things can be taught: these subjects are much on the minds of the three architects who've gathered in the lounge for an interview. All relatively new members of the art faculty, Linda Gatter, Ray Kinoshita, and Kathleen Lugosch are bringing fresh ideas, new energy, and considerable professional expertise to design and architectural studies at UMass.
Their revitalization of the interior design program here coincides with what Ray Kinoshita calls "a time of national soul-searching" in the field. Designers are thinking hard about the impact of the environments they produce, and this question motivates these three women as both architects and teachers.
The fact is, design plays a critical role in people's productiveness, comfort, safety, happiness. Kinoshita observes that "the design profession has been accused of not designing for people," and the accusation will ring true for anyone who has sat in an uncomfortable chair, searched for the on-off switch on a computer, or struggled through a doorway with a baby-stroller, never mind a wheelchair. The good news, says this architect, is that the profession is changing partly in response to social pressure, partly from the inside out, through the efforts of teachers like these three.
Lugosch, for one, is excited about the implications of the concept of sustainability: the idea that everything we do in the built environment should conserve and protect the natural one. "Design is a place to integrate that concept into everyone's consciousness," she believes.
Kinoshita adds that "as designers, we belong to one of the largest industries, one of the largest users of resources. Part of our teaching is developing students' awareness of materials." Fortunately, taking the environmental high-road doesn't require compromise anymore.
"It's fun," says Kinoshita. "We're living in a global market. We can choose stone from India or stone from Illinois. A good design can be a celebration of links around the world."
Ray Kinoshita's appreciation of good design and her sense of fun are as plain as the eyeglasses on her face. An assertive edge of green plastic travertine juts out over the tops of the lenses; the effect is architectural, startling, and playful. In conversation, Kinoshita comes across as serious and intelligent, but also mirthful. A physicist's daughter, she fell in love with architecture at age seven, when her family moved from upstate New York to live for a time in Switzerland. She was dazzled by both the dramatic natural landscape and the medieval castles and towns. "I was a very good tourist as a child," she laughs.
She followed up on that early enthusiasm at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. After working with architect Charles Moore on the New Orleans World Fair, and winning a national design competition for the Women's Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York, she opened her own practice in Amherst and started teaching at UMass some three years ago.
Lugosch and Gatter came less directly to architecture. Lugosch signed up for high school Latin so she could go on a class trip to Italy. A product of suburban New Jersey, she was as overwhelmed by Italy as Kinoshita by Switzerland. Yet though both her father and grandfather were architects "and my brother was supposed to be one" she didn't consider the profession until she had tried out a couple of others. As a community organizer, she experienced "an epiphany" when she realized that the most interesting thing about her job were the building plans coming across her desk.
Lugosch, too, went to Harvard's GSD, graduating in 1983. After a stint with Graham Gund Architects at a pivotal time for that Cambridge firm "when it was growing from a small office into a large one" she came to Amherst to practice in 1986, and to UMass to teach in 1995. This spring she won a faculty grant for an innovative computer-aided-design program she's developing.
Linda Gatter worked as a photo editor and kindergarten teacher before going on to study architecture at MIT. "I was attracted to the arts," she says, "but I wanted something with a social connection. I knew I didn't have the kind of personality to go off into the studio by myself." Gatter has collaborated on corporate offices, houses on Long Island, the offices of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, and a firehouse in Columbus, Indiana, a town known as "the Athens of the Prairie" for having commissioned leading architects to design its municipal buildings. She's taught at UMass since 1995, commuting from New York City where her private practice is based.
As practicing architects, these women bring to their teaching a clear understanding of workaday realities. Gatter notes that the field can be frustrating in its requirements for collaboration with a lot of different people. "In school, they don't necessarily teach you the importance of being diplomatic, but you quickly learn to be once you're working." Kinoshita puts it succinctly: "Without clients, we can't practice." Yet the necessity of working with others, the three agree, is also one of the benefits of design work. Lugosch describes it as "the fun of working with people from all walks of life, all the building trades, discovering a love of beauty among them and urging them to express it."
As a teacher, Gatter has observed the tendency of students "to redesign everything." The impulse to start from scratch is healthy, Gatter believes, but on actual projects it's not always realistic; design work is "always about working with a specific site, a specific program, a specific client."
To sensitize students to the array of possibilities, and to get them "out beyond the Valley," these teachers have their students reading international design magazines, attending lectures by visiting design professionals, taking field trips to furniture shows in Boston and New York. Graduates of the program should take away with them not just the sense of the wider world, but an expanded idea of where they might fit. "Design is about finding solutions, organizing information, making it into something," says Kinoshita. "There's not enough work for architects and designers. But there are lots of ways that students of design and architecture can go: building, manufacturing, politics, social planning."
To teach design, then, says Kinoshita, is to "arm everyone with very practical skills, as well as trying to teach them how to think about design. There should be a seamless continuity between the abstract and the practical. Yes, you have to know the codes, but the practical is not just tedious. Knowing what carpet is available can be as exciting as thinking about Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture."
First-year students tend to "believe there is a formula to use," adds Kinoshita with a smile, "and they want to know what it is." Of course, there is no formula; what these architects offer instead is "a way of thinking that's centered around asking questions. Figuring out what questions to ask is the goal." Lugosch emphasizes research skills: "figuring out what you don't know because you will never know everything and how to find that information." Gatter feels the key is "paying attention, noticing things." She emphasizes to her students that "it can be the simple things" lighting, for instance that are vital in a design.
"Details," Lugosch says knowingly. Who said "God is in the details"? "Mies van der Rohe," answers Lugosch. "My buddy Mies." - FSW
