For Art Center–a 73-year-old industrial-design hothouse with close ties to the business world–this is a radical new agenda. The tradition here has been pragmatic and rigorously geared toward training professionals for careers in everything from transportation and product design to film and advertising. The kids call it “medical school without the blood”: the demanding schedule doesn’t allow for much sleep. Most come ready to dive into the work of their future professions–and perhaps someday to succeed like the Art Center alumni who’ve created the PT Cruiser or the “Got Milk?” campaign.
Koshalek insists he wants to preserve the school’s links to the corporate world. But at the same time, he’s an evangelist, preaching a new religion–and not all of the 400 faculty have converted, though the trustees, Koshalek says, “are truly be-hind me.” His mission is to push budding designers into the messier problems of the world, where their creative ideas can be applied in health care or housing or the environment.
Public service for a design college isn’t unique. Many schools–Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Rhode Island School of Design–use teachers’ and students’ design skills for projects to help their communities. (At the Rural Studio at Auburn University, founded by the late architect Sam Mockbee, students build low-cost houses out of such ingenious materials as hay bales.) But perhaps no one is taking the social agenda for design education farther–or more publicly–than Koshalek, a tireless promoter of design and culture in L.A., where he used to run the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Still, in the idyllic hilltop setting of Art Center–talk about an ivory tower–the world’s urgent needs tend to recede. The intensely focused students work in relative isolation. In the transportation studio, Jee-sun Park (one of the rare women to choose this major) works on her final project–designing a kind of small version of the PT Cruiser. “It’s time for Chrysler to attract a younger generation,” says Park, who knows exactly what she wants when she gets out of school: a job at Chrysler.
But Koshalek’s message is making its mark. He started a new department called designmatters, which looks for ways students can link up to real-world projects. Film student Hoku Uchiyama came up with an idea for an international public-service announcement against drunken driving, which designmatters helped finance. The inventive little film ended up taking a prize in a young directors’ festival at Cannes. Despite the school’s careerist tradition, says Uchiyama, “people are jumping into designmatters. That experience could advance your career, too, but in different ways.”
Koshalek’s taking his outreach mission to the wider city of Pasadena. Art Center is coming down from the acropolis, to an ambitious second campus he’s building in a gritty industrial neighborhood. Phase one: the renovation of an old Douglas aircraft factory, the site of the first supersonic-jet wind tunnel in the United States. (The vast spaces, as you can imagine, are awesome.) When it’s finished next spring, the place will be home to Art Center’s public-education programs, which reach 5,000 children and adults in the community, as well as exhibition spaces and a rooftop restaurant. Nearby, Koshalek plans to build student housing and to convert an enormous art deco power plant into another exhibition and lecture hall; Gehry has already agreed to design it. “This whole area is being developed as a way of bringing Art Center directly to the city,” says Koshalek–with big potential benefits to a neglected part of Pasadena. Meanwhile, up on the hill, he hopes to expand, too, with future buildings by Gehry and Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza.
And, yes, Koshalek is taking Art Center global–finding ways to hook up with projects around the world. He’s on the road two weeks out of every month; so far he and Erica Clark, his international vice president, are planning collaborations with two design schools in Beijing, and possibly another in India. (Clark gets full exposure to her boss’s legendary enthusiasm and energy. “I come out of a meeting with him and feel like I’ve drunk too much coffee,” she says, laughing, “and I don’t drink coffee!”) Through the United Nations, Art Center’s been invited to design a village in Kenya for AIDS orphans that will tap into planning, architecture, communications and graphic-design skills–and put into practice the core Koshalek doctrine: “The responsibility of design has expanded beyond products and the market imperative,” he says. “You have to deal with a much larger world.”
Koshalek uses such platforms as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to preach his message that design can help solve seemingly intractable problems. The man’s optimism is as awesome as that former wind tunnel: he doesn’t dream small. His plans for Art Center, phased over 10 years, could cost north of $150 million. “Every time I see someone, I ask for money,” says Koshalek–and we believe him. So far he’s collared close to $25 million. But he’s raising more than money. He’s raising the consciousness of the next generation of designers.
