Q&A
Appointed in July as dean of the School of Constructed Environments (SCE), the country’s only comprehensive architecture and lighting, product, and interior design school, architect Bill Morrish began implementing a vision of design education as a symphony instead of a solo. Morrish emphasizes the interplay of disciplines, people, and resources and encourages exchange between the academy and the city. Trained at Berkeley and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Morrish has been researching sustainable cities and housing concepts, community design that responds to local and global conditions, and educational programs that can plug into community-based problem solving anywhere in the world. As the first chair of the combined departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, Morrish encouraged grad students to become stewards of both the natural and built environments. SCE Dean BILL Morrish spoke with re:D about how converging systems, tools, people, and ideas will lead design education—and design—to a better future.
Shonquis Moreno: Describe your vision for change at SCE. Bill Morrish: In the past, we had discrete disciplines that supported one
another in the making of the building. Now we’re beginning to understand that what we do in all these disciplines, when we add them up and work together, has a huge impact on the larger city. We need to understand how they’re interrelated and make more explicit arguments for working together. If you start a project together, you go into constructing that environment completely differently.
SM: You also encourage collaboration on real-world projects, instead of just teaching your students to design, say, penthouses. BM: The faculty is interested in the city of the other half. Instead
of focusing on the superwealthy, we’re interested in the marketplaces, the housing, the products, and the everyday activities of the street. What happens on Atlantic Avenue is going to drive what happens on Broadway.
SM: What are you doing to encourage interplay among disciplines? BM: When I came to this school, the faculty was already engaged in unique projects, which I make more visible: We’ve been doing more public programs that are tied to courses. We’ll be starting a series where faculty members present their own work to their colleagues at Parsons. I’m developing new models of studio teaching to reflect the fact that some projects are highly technical and others involve collaborative community engagement.
SM: So how do you organize the teaching around those projects and identify how each discipline approaches different kinds of problems? BM: Among the faculty, we talk about what we want to deliver and how we want that
outcome to be used in order to figure out how to approach a problem. We’re adjusting the way we teach so that students begin to learn that skill as well. That’s a necessary shift because institutional models are outdated.