How the Otis/Parsons School Designs the Complete Student

Francisco Guttierez, a sophomore in the Environmental Design course at the Otis/Parsons School of Design, struggled with a problem of conscience: How do you design a podium for a politician if you distrust the entire business of politics?

The balsa model Guttierez had built to explore the problem reflected his confusions. A cross between a Sunset Boulevard billboard and a stick-like electronic media construction, Guttierez’s podium for a politician seemed gawky and muddled to Fred Fisher, chairman of the school’s Environmental Design Department.

Fisher and Guttierez put their heads together to puzzle out the conflict, which Guttierez described, saying, “I have many doubts about encouraging politicians to spread their lies in public. So how do I express this while also creating a functional platform for speeches?”

Fisher replied: “It’s a real-life tension only the individual designer can work through on his own. Follow your intuition, but be informed. Find out what you really feel about politicians, and present a design that is resolved, not confused. That’s the object of the exercise.”

It also defines the objectives of the innovative environmental design course, which in Fisher’s words seeks “to deal with all aspects of the human context, from furniture through interiors, buildings, landscape and urban design. In essence, you need to know how you want to make people feel in the environments you contrive. . . .”

To open their minds and hearts, students “pursue some projects that are consciously designed to instill calm, and others meant to instill anxiety.” Whether they go on to become artists or architects, set designers or furniture makers, “our students will approach their tasks not as narrow specialists but as generalists aware of the whole human condition,” Fisher said.

He says the Otis/Parsons course is unmatched in Los Angeles for training design generalists, serving as a basis for graduates to choose a range of options from pursuing post-graduate architectural degrees to designing movie sets or studying landscape architecture.

The three-year bachelor of fine arts course was named “Interior Architecture and Design” in 1986 when Fisher replaced architect David Meckel as department chairman. Under Meckel, the part-time faculty had been almost all architects.

But Fisher said, “I chose the designation ‘environmental design’ because it encompasses a wider range than ‘interior architecture.’ I almost totally reconstituted the faculty to reflect this change, and brought in a spectrum of specialists, from artist Sheila Klein to environmental psychologist Dru Sherrod, furniture designer Judith Wachsmann and historian Charles Calvo.”

An architect with degrees in fine arts and art history, Fisher is very aware of the need to broaden the background and training of designers. The projects that emerge from his busy Santa Monica practice are noted for their strong connection with other visual arts and the influence of artists in the design process.

Laying a Foundation

As outlined in Fisher’s term, the environmental design course begins with a yearlong foundation of general and liberal arts courses, which all Otis/Parsons students must complete.

After their first sophomore semester in environmental design, students undergo a faculty review and those that do not seem suited to advance are encouraged to change departments.

“We work them hard the first year, and if they don’t respond to the way we approach design, we tell them to drop it,” Fisher said. “We’re looking to graduate well-rounded visual artists who can turn their talents to any field.”

With only 45 students in the course, the studios are small and intimate; faculty and students collaborate closely.

The environmental design students also work with those in other departments. In their “Fabricated Image” project, for example, they team with fashion, fine arts and photography students to produce a life-size model of a “real-world scale environment,” replete with the clothes or costumes for its supposed inhabitants.

“Every artist and designer is in the business of fabricating images,” faculty member Klein said. “Painters, sculptors, architects, landscape architects, fashion photographers and art photographers and set designers--even people who create shop window displays--are filling the environment with new imagery intended to evoke a particular mood or response. This is the powerful common ground we all share.”

Fisher agreed, adding, “We’re constantly pushing students out into the real world. We feel all environmental ideas have to be tested in a real-life situation, and at full scale. Models and drawings can only take you so far.”

Janice Beckenbach, a junior in the program, chose it “because it connects me with a wide variety of things out there in the real world, and because I’m interested in so many things.”

A Flexible Approach

She already works after school in the woodworking department of an architectural timber mill, which turns out furniture details. She also designs window displays for local department stores. Because of its flexible, open approach, she chose Otis/Parsons over its sister school, Parsons School of Design in New York; the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; and the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.

“Otis-P gives me a unique range of choices,” she said. “I love its rare combination of looseness and rigor, of freedom of ideas along with disciplined work habits. It’s a mix you seldom find in more conventional design courses.”

Not that all is absolutely ideal at the school. Fisher has a major battle on his hands with “sheer ignorance”--his students’ generally poor cultural and educational background, especially in arts history and literature.

“Contemporary art students are seldom in love with the past or the word,” he lamented. “They feel that artists need exist only on the plane of a visually based intuition. They have no sense of history, even in the the arts, and tend to think they’ve invented the world from scratch. This is a grievous limitation. . . .”

As an intellectual Easterner educated at Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania, he suspects he is “out of sync with the lazy-minded West Coast ethos.”

Despite that, he insists that a liberal-arts component is vital in designers’ education. He argues passionately that literacy matters when artists and architects think about the man-made environment they hope to enrich.

“The images we fabricate have to have a potent cultural resonance, if they are to have a real impact and improve our environment at every level of endeavor,” he said. “That can only happen if designers know their culture and are responsible to its history.”