A HIGHER LEVEL OF ART
greeted me
next, but not at Pasadena’s acclaimed museums such as
the Norton Simon and the Pacific Asia. Instead, I drove
from the Rose Bowl up through a hillside neighborhood
to one of the world’s top art schools, the Art Center
College of Design.
In the 1960s, when the school was located in Los
Angeles near my junior high, I used to pop into the
lobby gallery to see amazing student work: scale
models of futuristic cars by tomorrow’s Detroit designers,
wild re-imaginings of parking meters and drinking
fountains from industrial design students, a stunning
pencil rendering of Bob Dylan with ruffled feathers for
hair. (As a 14-year-old, I also discovered that the life-
drawing classes involved nude female models, but that’s
another story.)
I parked on the Pasadena campus near its renowned
“bridge building,” designed in 1974 by modernist
architect Craig Ellwood. This long black box of a
structure spans an arroyo in one dramatic jump.
Lucky for me, the school still has a student
gallery. A product designer had made a padded
dog carrier that cleverly unzips to become a plush
dog bed. A graphic design student’s print ad
showed a photo of an empty closet, labeled “$925,”
and in small type at the bottom: “Clean Up. eBay.”
The projects were already professional caliber:
a wheelchair that works on ice and snow, a battle-
scarred prop helmet for
Star Wars
, a reinvented violin,
a human-powered washer-dryer shaped like a stool
and operated with a foot, a design for a futuristic
airport passenger lounge. The student work snap-
crackle-and-popped with innovation and creativity.
Things are going to look a lot better when these
kids get out into the world.
PASADENA
50
summer
|
fall
