i. institutional support and commitment to continuous improvement

I. Institutional Support and Commitment to Continuous Improvement
non-grading policy encourages each student to pursue ideas and work to his/her potential rather
than a grading system and the potentially negative impact it could exert on the development of
creative new approaches to art and design. Assessment and evaluation of student work in the MArch
program is tracked according to NAAB Student Performance Criteria as they apply to each class.
These assessments are especially valuable for the faculty, who must evaluate the effectiveness of their
coursework and ultimately choose student work to share with the NAAB Visiting Team.
AIADO fosters open discourse and practice across the many diverse and unique disciplines that
participate in defining the studio culture. Fostering a collaborative mode of exchange, the department
recognizes the importance of interdisciplinary expertise and collaboration between our longstanding
institutional counterparts, the collective student and faculty body, administrative departments, and the
disciplines housed within AIADO.
From the inception of the Architecture, Interior Architecture and Design Objects department the goal
of an interdisciplinary practice of design has been its foremost commitment. Intellectual freedom and
open exchange, growth of a productive and vibrant studio environment, and an encouragement of
open respectful dialogue and discourse have been its tenets.
The balanced relationship between the studio and the entire curriculum figures prominently into
the department’s studio culture policy as it specifically maintains the importance of a well-balanced
education that is necessary of any design professional. The delivery, integration and synthesis of
design criteria along with course work and electives—such as structures, preservation, social theory,
sustainability, philosophy, art and technology, to name but a few—remains one of the important roles
that the studio serves. It is the program’s goal and obligation to establish a forum that imparts the
necessity to understand and have competency in all areas of research that engage in the practice of
architecture. Understanding and competency of the disciplinary specific activities framed within the
arena of architecture serve as the foundation for studio work. The department foremost believes and
encourages that intellectual inquiry form the basis of any design activity and response.
Over the intervening years, studio lectures and case studies have taken their place alongside the
individual desk critiques of the studio, regular art history lectures, and the Socratic questioning
methods of the seminars in liberal arts and other departments. All of these new class types are
designed to reduce any impediments to individual discovery and learning in an open creative
environment.
AIADO works with the AIAS studio culture guidelines and holds regular meetings between student
officials and faculty—IDP Coordinator Assistant Professor Tristan Sterk and MArch Program Director,
Associate Professor Douglas Pancoast—on the issue of studio culture. AIAS-elected student officials
gather issues for the agenda of meetings held twice per term. The recommendations of the Studio
Culture Committee are brought into the goals of the department, program, and school.
2) Studio work
One of the legacies of SAIC’s long history as an art school is an extraordinarily engaging studio culture.
In many ways the School’s success as an arts institution has been built on its studio culture, and it has
become one of the architecture school’s most important academic assets. Many of the architecture
program’s policies and procedures are meant to translate the intense, adaptable and speculative
culture of the art studio into the context of a professional architecture program. At SAIC, the
architecture studio becomes a community that depends upon a culture of experiment sustained by a
careful reciprocity between professional rigor and a humane and optimistic engagement with student
life and experience.
11 | Spring 2011
SECTION I Institutional Support and Commitment to Continuous Improvement