Interdisciplinary Initatives

About: At GSAPP, the line between teaching and research is systematically blurred. Students and teachers stand together on the edge between the known and the unknown, determined to invent the best step forward for their fields.

The school is committed to a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary approach that establishes the highest level of professional, technical, and creative expertise in each of its fields of study while actively analyzing and rethinking the very basis of those fields. The whole school operates as a research laboratory. The heart of this experimental mentality is the studio culture in which each design project is treated as an independent experiment on an intriguing question, an attitude that permeates the rest of the school in classes, individual research projects, laboratories, centers, lectures, symposia, and publications.

There is a core of basic training in the early design studios and the key survey classes in history/theory, technology, visual studies, and professional practice but this solid core allows the subsequent investigations to be even more radical and precise. Each studio, course, and project, tests a polemical position. Even the line between studio and coursework becomes blurred. Studios increasingly have a seminar, lecture, or symposium component and history/theory classes are increasingly adopting the mode of studio culture in becoming project-based investigations of particular questions. The result is a rich ecology of overlapping experiments with different trajectories that continually evolve and allow the school to think its way forward in response to our ever changing intellectual and practical horizon.

At any one time, certain questions galvanize a number of experiments within this diverse array of overlapping probes and the school starts to develop a collective expertise around these interdisciplinary initiatives.