A hypothetical project fostered practical results. Throughout the semester, Carnegie Mellon University students in Andrew Stone’s second-year studio course explored architecture through human experience.
The monthslong undertaking involved designing a space for Jewish artist Benjamin Schwartz, a Squirrel Hill-based painter who goes by “Benny Blindspots” due to his legal blindness. Blending reality and fantasy, students were told that Schwartz’s potential studio would be located in a vacant Bloomfield lot.
Because the site actually exists, students were required to “work within real constraints,” Stone said. And, by repeatedly meeting with Schwartz “as if he were a real client,” students discovered how collaborative processes tailor to users’ needs.
During the semester, CMU student David Tang was tasked with not only creating digital sketches and carving prototypes, but visiting Schwartz’s Squirrel Hill studio, exploring its subterranean space and speaking with the artist.
The takeaway, Tang said, is people interact with areas in different ways “and we don’t see that by just designing it in a room. We need to be able to experience it.”
Site visits and discussions weren’t the only mechanisms for gaining better appreciation of their client. At one point during the semester, Tang and his 15 fellow classmates were blindfolded and asked to walk indoors with canes.
“That was really hard for us to navigate. We had to think about dimensions,” Tang said. Often, when putting together a design, people fail to recognize “just the amount of steps it takes for you to get from point A to point B.”
The blindfolding experience, along with multiple conversations with Schwartz, elicited new awareness.
Designers can sometimes “over-engineer some elements,” Tang said. Spending time with a client, observing how they operate and wish to work, enables a realization of the “power a person has” and fosters greater comprehension of the “space itself.”
Fellow CMU student Miles Rainwater said the semester-long study resulted in newfound regard for revision.
“A lot of times we rush or finish things for a deadline, and we’re kind of the only people whose hands have been on it — apart from maybe the instructor’s — but at the end of the day, the user is the most important element,” Rainwater said. Experiencing an “adaptive process” means revisiting not only “whatever your concept is,” but altering an understanding of how the “user ends up working with that product.”
Months of exchange between Schwartz, Stone and the students culminated at CMU on April 28. Standing beside paper designs and 3D models, students pointed to sliding doors, innovative handles and creative floor plans. With Schwartz and Stone nearby, college sophomores demonstrated their work and answered questions from classmates, other CMU faculty and passersby.
Of particular interest to Stone were documents in the corner of CMU’s Great Hall.
The tactile drawings with ink that “kind of swells off the page” allows users to “physically feel the plan,” he said. These drawings, which were produced with help from the Library for Accessible Media for Pennsylvanians, enable both architects and clients to experience “a simpler way to communicate.”
Bolstering connection and appreciation was integral to the course, and Schwartz was a perfect partner, Stone continued. “I wanted to teach a studio that was very kind of process-oriented.”
When architects or creatives design in a shop the results aren’t exactly what’s intended. There’s a “kind of feedback loop where you have an idea in your head, you’re trying to bring it into the physical world, and there’s pushback against that because you have to deal with the material qualities or the tools that are available to you,” Stone said. “If you embrace that and go with it, it can make some really interesting designs, and that’s exactly how Benny works. He’s not one of those artists that plans out the whole painting beforehand and has a grid where he’s doing a paint-by-number type of thing. He allows himself to be immersed in the process, which is really what I’m trying to get my students to do.”
Schwartz, who throughout the semester not only spoke with students and exhibited his space but allowed visitors to watch him paint, praised the professor and his students.
“They were clearly listening when they came and visited the studio. They addressed the needs that we had chatted about each in their own unique way,” Schwartz said. Students created “vastly different models for creating the space and finding pathways,” and as a result “I found myself, even at my own studio, rethinking my space, and I’ve made changes.”
What Schwartz didn’t transform, though, was his sense of humor or identity.
When students scheduled a Friday talk with Schwartz at CMU, the artist remarked he was happy to meet but that the conversation must conclude well before Shabbat began.
“If I don’t get home before sunset, I’ll turn into a pillar of salt,” Schwartz said.
On a separate occasion, after observing the project’s progress, Schwartz commended the students.
“I told them, ‘I can tell you guys are really keeping busy and actually doing work, not just going out to protest,’” he said.
Schwartz, who grew up in Squirrel Hill and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, said that working with Stone and the students afforded meaningful insight.
“I’m 36, I’m starting to move off into that next generation of being fully grown, or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “Seeing the sincerity with which they approached the whole project, they didn’t make me feel like they were just there for school or for a grade — I’m sure they’re committed to getting those A’s, that’s the kind of students they are — there was genuine interest. There was genuine excitement from many of the students in terms of how they probed, and questioned and wanted to really know what they could design.”
The students’ passion and sensitivity for the project reflected something deeply human, Schwartz continued.
As architects or creatives, “you could just design this home or whatever,” he said. Instead, these students are “talking about accessibility right at the beginning of their artistic careers.”
Riffing on his own visibility, Schwartz laughed and continued, “It opened my eyes.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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