Students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC, are highly concerned about the condition of the world’s environment. Many of them have elected to pursue design curricula that offer a wider understanding of relevant areas of study, including ecological principles, environmental activism, and resource conservation.
SAIC’s Sculpture Department
The Sculpture department at SAIC is one of the nation’s largest, most diverse and comprehensive Sustainable Design Graduate Programs that explores the leading edge of contemporary design and theory. Its curricular themes are: Public Practice, Place, Permanence and Ephemerality and Systems and Space.
Objectives of the Sustainable Design Program
The laboratory at the Sculpture, titled the SAIC Knowledge Lab, is a space where both students and faculty collaboratively engage in processes and topics surrounding knowledge, research, and innovation. Through combined efforts, both parties identify such core topics as waste, energy, and urban agriculture.
Through the sustainable design graduate programs, they also engage in in-depth research and prepare collaborative projects designed to generate new knowledge that can meaningfully impact the core issues.
The Sustainable Design Program Curriculum
Sustainable design graduate programs focus on multi-departmental topics of sustainability. Topics include:
- Sustainability
- Site and Place in the Age of the Anthropocene
- Eco Design
- Earth’s Changing Climate
- The Nature of Ecology
- Arch/Inarch: Matter and Material
- Advanced Materials and Fabrication Studio
- Ceramics and Architecture
- Woodworking in the 21st Century
- Design Action: North Lawndale
- BioArt Studio
For over 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has produced some of the most influential designers, artists, and scholars in the world. To learn more about SAIC and the sustainable design graduate programs. Please visit them.