our buildings in Lacoste<\/a> abound with echoes of their previous lives, including examples of medieval statuary, sculpture and pottery found on site, areas of exposed wall that reveal carvings and details from centuries past, and a large, dome-styled eighteenth-century communal oven that now serves as a reading room in the SCAD Lacoste library.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
A room in the Maison Basse<\/h4>\n The 31 buildings of the Lacoste campus were donated to the university in 2002, due to our non-profit status combined with the university\u2019s reputation for excellence in historic preservation and revitalization. Consider Maison Basse, a five-building, 28-room complex that dates back to the twelfth century. The buildings on the site have seen a lot of history since the sixteenth century, having served as an inn, a gambling den, and as a stable for the Marquis de Sade. Long left to the elements, Maison Basse was in a state of ruin until we brought together architects, preservationists, interior designers, historians and sociologists for a meticulous and extensive conservation and renewal. Completed in time for SCAD Lacoste\u2019s tenth anniversary in 2012, the revitalized complex today contains housing, dining facilities, studio space, a computer lab, and classrooms for architecture, art history, painting, landscape design and photography, among others.<\/p>\n
SSS: Starting with the Savannah campus, where SCAD literally brought a sleepy, 18th-century southern town back to life, your design school has evolved into a strong advocate for historic preservation. Could you trace how you went from the first reclaimed building in Savannah to SCAD’s expanding campus in Georgia?<\/strong><\/p>\nPW: When I co-founded the university, I never imagined that SCAD would attract 1,000 students, and now there are over 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students\u2014from nearly 50 states and over 100 countries. In 1978, I was focused on restoring a single building, now Poetter Hall, built in 1892, and was the Savannah Volunteer Guard Armory. A beautiful, 36,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival building, it was little more than a shell when we acquired it\u2014there was no heat or air conditioning, the paint and plaster were peeling, many of the windows were broken and boarded up, and parts of the building were coated with a black, greasy residue from a diner that had once occupied the first floor. Through six months of major rehabilitation efforts, working what my mother called \u201chalf days\u201d (meaning 12-hour shifts), the building was ready to go in time for the first day of classes.<\/p>\n
Since then we have gone on to preserve and revitalize more than 100 buildings on three continents, including a British magistracy building in Hong Kong; abandoned public school buildings and a former synagogue in Savannah; medieval ruins in Lacoste; and Ivy Hall in Atlanta\u2014the latter considered an exemplar of the Queen Anne-Victorian architectural style, and thought to be Atlanta’s oldest, most complete, and single most important residence from the post-Civil War period. SCAD\u2019s largest project to date has been the extensive preservation and renovation of the nation\u2019s oldest and largest surviving antebellum railroad depot, built in 1853, into the SCAD Museum of Art\u2014a world-class teaching museum and contemporary arts center that was awarded the top 2014 AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture.<\/p>\n
I am proud to say that SCAD\u2019s historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects have been recognized by the Art Deco Societies of America, the American Society of Interior Designers, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, UNESCO, and the American Institute of Architects.<\/p>\n
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SCAD’s namesake Savannah campus<\/h4>\n SSS:\u00a0 Lacoste in Provence presents a much deeper historic context than any U.S. location can\u2014Lacoste is a medieval village. What does the famous light of Provence, the texture of the stone walls, and the village’s relationship to nature, bring to your twenty-first\u00a0century students’ world view?<\/strong><\/p>\nPW: SCAD students in Lacoste live and study in buildings dating from the ninth to the nineteenth\u00a0centuries, gaining a first-hand understanding of the relationships between the present and the past, and among environment, materials and experience. Life in Lacoste directly connects students to their forebears, to the minds and hands of another age that made the doors, lintels, fa\u00e7ades, corbels, and other important details they live among for the duration of the term. In Lacoste, students can learn just by observing their own educational environment\u2014noticing the ideas that stand the test of time, and how excellent the execution of those ideas by curators and artisans must be to last through generations of use.<\/p>\n
Many of today\u2019s university undergraduates have grown up in a world of virtualization and prefabricated standardization, terms that do not in any sense apply to the distinct learning environment of Lacoste. The solidity, mass and texture of the stone walls, the idiosyncratic undulations of the cobblestone streets, and the ancient invention illuminated by nearby Roman ruins, viscerally bring home the fact that everything we do today contributes to a tapestry of presence, creativity, and context that unfolds across history. Students at SCAD Lacoste are educated in a landscape with many stories, through which many makers have passed, and to which many have contributed.<\/p>\n
The extraordinary light and pastoral settings of Lacoste and the Lub\u00e9ron valley have attracted artists for centuries. Considering the influence the region had on van Gogh, C\u00e9zanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and so many others, the area rivals Paris as a birthplace of modern art. SCAD faculty focus their learning and attention to ensure similarly transformative experiences for students\u2014who will continue the region\u2019s rich history of cultural redefinition, innovation, and invention.<\/p>\n
SSS: As we mothball our preoccupation with Modernist amnesia, context and local have become important words to those who design. Can you talk about how Savannah, Lacoste, and your other campuses reinforce the student body’s current interest in authenticity, pride of place, and connectivity? I’m especially interested in how you tie these interests and unique resources to design pedagogy.<\/strong><\/p>\nPW: Businesses value international experience in new hires. Employers desire strong contributors who are well traveled, culturally literate and diverse, and who have been exposed to a broad spectrum of situations and perspectives. SCAD\u2019s 12,000 students can study at campuses situated on three different continents, moving seamlessly through degree programs while combining the best of local context and global connectivity. Whether living and studying in a nineteenth-century cityscape like Savannah, an urban media hub with abundant parks like Atlanta, a medieval village like Lacoste, or an international metropolis like Hong Kong, students are immersed in the distinct flavor of day-to-day life in each place.\u00a0 Professional and personal networks are expanded through study trips, internships, and professional partnerships established by SCAD to benefit our students. We offer them well planned and rigorously assessed formal learning, as well as learning by walking around.<\/p>\n
This combination of local contexts and distributed connectivity offers our students opportunities to develop an appreciation of where they are at the moment, and to see ways they can live and create in the world at large. SCAD\u2019s witty and wise educational environments are among the many resources we offer to students\u2014resources that are part of the reason, along with accredited degree programs, expert faculty, and real world experience, why our students are successful in their careers. In a survey of our spring 2013 graduates, 93 percent of respondents were employed, pursuing further education, or both, within ten months of graduation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The co-founder of the Savannah College of Art and Design on how historic contexts and local cultures enrich modern design education<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":154,"featured_media":18544,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_image_focal_point":[],"legacy_WP_ID":null},"tags":[96,682,230],"metro_tax_domain":[75,6,7],"metro_tax_topic":[13,16],"metro_tax_program":[],"metro_issue":[],"metro_cat_viewpoint":[],"internal_flag":[],"class_list":["post-58740","metro_viewpoint","type-metro_viewpoint","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-qa","tag-savannah-college-of-art-and-design","tag-universities","metro_tax_domain-education","metro_tax_domain-preservation","metro_tax_domain-student","metro_tax_topic-architecture","metro_tax_topic-cities"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Q&A: SCAD's Paula Wallace on the School's Adaptive Reuse Focus - Metropolis<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n\t \n