Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

Classroom Designs Inspired by Creative Minds

In the coming years, no educational paradigm shift will be more forcefully felt than the enrichment of disciplines through cross-pollination. Context and connection are fundamentally changing the way teachers teach and students learn. Not only are we hurtling at breakneck speed into an era in which traditional hard lines between the arts and the sciences are blurring, but we are also doing so with one eye firmly fixed on the way design can help the left and right brain work in harmony. How should the old-style classroom model evolve? Consider two illustrious thinkers who shaped the ideas of their times: Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. Destroying the traditional learning environment and creating something entirely new was a major challenge for these maestros, but here’s what they came up with.

The da Vinci Studio: Action Through Synthesis of Knowledge

In Leonardo da Vinci’s world, the lines between the disciplines, pervasive in today’s schools, were absent; the works he did as a scientist, mathematician, and artist all informed the other efforts. No wonder one can look at his scientific drawings and wonder whether they were meant to be works of art and at his artwork and marvel at its scientific rigor. This kind of free-flowing interchange was accomplished in a workplace that was part artist’s studio, part science lab, and part model-building shop.

So, what would a modern-day da Vinci studio look like as a classroom? Imagine a place with lots of daylight and directed artificial light, connection to an outdoor deck through wide or rolling doors, access to water, power supplied from a floor or ceiling grid, a wireless computer network, lots of storage, a floor finish that is hard to damage, high ceilings, places to display finished projects, reasonable acoustic separation, and transparency to the inside and outside with the potential for good views and vistas.

To take full advantage of today’s da Vinci studio, teachers would need to collaborate more, offer students the opportunity to work on real projects, and encourage cross-disciplinary thinking in a way rarely seen within the four walls of traditional, unrevised schools.

The Einstein Studio: Creative Reflection and Inspired Collaboration

Albert Einstein’s workplace was more study than studio. Preferring solitude and connections to nature, Einstein gave himself lots of time to stay in his own head. Because so much of what he did was cerebral, his inspiration could have come during quiet walks and in places other than his primary workplace. His official workplace may simply have let him develop ideas he had generated elsewhere. And so, when we talk about the Einstein studio today, we do so more in a metaphorical sense than as a way to actually duplicate Einstein’s workplace in the modern school.

We can imagine that today’s Einstein studio might include a place that encourages creative reflection, an inspiring setting not sealed off from the world outside or from those real problems and issues that must always have some place in abstract theorizing. To imagine an Einsteinian classroom, conjure the various ways the main lobby of a five-star hotel is furnished: It welcomes people alone or in small groups, it offers comfortable furnishings, it may nurture aspiration and inspiration with high ceilings, lots of glass, and easy connection to natural elements and water features, and it creates zones of privacy that remain firmly connected to the activity throughout the larger space. The Einstein studio can also be a movable feast, a portable state of mind to be re-created around a shade tree in the spring or on a class nature walk.

Think about connecting or even cross-pollinating the Einstein and da Vinci studios – creating a venue for both inspiration and inspired action.