PARIS STUDIO, RISD
Andrew just returned from a month long stay in Paris where he lead a group of students in a Rhode Island School of Design urban landscape studio. The coursed offered an opportunity for students to vicariously assume the role of patron and critic usually allotted to Parisians. The four-week long course compressed the content of a semester-long studio into a format of daily meetings. The studio examined the origins of design and policy in Paris which ensured lasting influences on artistic achievement in ages past, present and future.
Students utilized a variety of media processes including but not limited to sketchbooks, photo-documentation, and both digital and analogue diagrams, to study the spatial and temporal patterns of Paris. In the crosshairs of research: policy-driven initiatives for artistic creation and urban infrastructural redevelopment (past and present).
As their understanding of the city deepened, students began to develop culturally-oriented proposals for the repurposing of a piece of urban infrastructure: la Petite Ceinture. A half-mile long portion of this derelict train corridor that once encircled the city became the host site for students’ proposed public projects, ephemeral event programming, anthropological incarnations, artistic experiments, landscape spaces, etc.