School of the Museum of Fine Arts

The School of the Museum of Fine Arts had two studios that served multiple roles; traditional drawing instruction (a model on a pedestal surrounded by students in chairs), a painting studio (students with easels and a 'painting set up'), and a gallery (requiring wall surface and drawing storage).  All those furnishings; chairs, easels, temporary homosote panels, etc. that made all these roles possible also filled the room with clutter and made reconfiguration clumsy and time consuming.  The solution, a collaboration with artist David Kelley, partly solved by pivoting 'drawing walls' (part easel, part cabinet, part architecture) anchored to the perimeter with common plumbing components can create small 'rooms' within the studio for painting classes and exhibits and when retracted become an innocuous part of the perimeter of the room.  This facilitates 'setting the room up' as well as solving the empirical problem of drawing and painting storage.  In addition, when left to the student's imagination the 'drawing walls' create an infinite number of spatial configurations integrating the space of the work with space of the room and  give the activities in the room some permanent architectural recognition. But this did not solve all problems, it still remained to accomodate traditional drawing instruction.  For that you'll have to click here.