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Interior Architecture Office: Sharp building, 12th floor Interior architecture is the collaborative art of spatial investigations and interventions. Sustainability, interaction design, user-centered design, and immersive environments are all expanded practices of interior architecture. The faculty challenges students to explore, experience, and engage with architecture, fashion, fiber, theatrical design, exhibit design, lighting design, interactive design, and furniture design in their work. Interior architecture at the School integrates the creative, cultural, and critical abilities required of designers with the visionary, exploratory, and conceptual abilities of the artist. The interior architecture program at the School is one of the few in the country that is located within an art school. The department occupies the twelfth floor of the landmark John Beyad and Alice Rosene Sharp building (formerly Champlain), which is located in the center of downtown Chicago. Facilities include spacious and well-lit design studios, a central critique space, lighting lab, Macintosh and NT computer labs with color printers, slide and flatbed scanners, digital video editors, CD-ROM writers, a specialized materials and samples library, reference library, conference room, lecture room, critique space, soft materials shop, woodworking shop and facilities for photographing and exhibiting student and faculty work.
The faculty, both part- and full-time, are all practicing designers, artists, or architects with a wide range of viewpoints and expertise, from user-centered research, sustainability, exhibition design, ecological urban design, theory, embedded technologies, industrial design, furniture design, historic preservation, architectural animation, to archaeology. An endowed lecture series brings prominent practitioners to the School each year, such as Antoine Predock, Dakota Jackson, Eva Jiricna, Michael Vanderbyl, Andrée Putman, and David Rockwell. Lectures by faculty, students, Chicago architects, artists, and interior designers offer stimulating insight into contemporary local practice. The department features annual faculty and student exhibitions contributing to the academic and professional design dialogue of Chicago. The city of Chicago itself is a living museum of modern architectural history, a center of active architectural discourse, and a lively and successful furniture design community. The city provides a wealth of resources including historical and contemporary architecture, the Merchandise Mart, architectural and decorative arts museum collections, and architectural libraries. The four-year Bachelor of Interior Architecture (BIA) professional degree program emphasizes "design from the inside out." Students use drawing, modeling, digital imaging, and full-scale construction in exploring re-conceptualizing of space. Interior architecture design studios are the core of the BIA curriculum. Studios meet twice a week and comprehensively explore the process of designing objects and spaces through different methodologies while increasing knowledge and application of technical parameters. Complementing studio work each semester are courses in critical studies, materials, and technology. A two-year Master of Fine Arts program in the department also stresses the art of spatial investigations and interventions. Integration of the cultural experience of spatial exploration and students' independent work is stressed. Motion analysis and user interactivity are studied using state of the art digital technology. Artists, designers, and architects achieved in their respective fields come together in a common graduate interior architecture seminar in the first year, and graduate interior architecture thesis in the second year to share theoretical readings and cultural contexts in a series of projects. Students participate in interdisciplinary critiques, work with accomplished architects and designers, and culminate the first year with a public installation of select projects from the studio which contribute to the design dialogue of the city. Digital explorations are realized along with drawn, modeled, and built work at a range of scales. Studio art, architecture, and design history courses complement the studio work. Most interior architecture students work in cooperative education jobs arranged through the School, or part time in architecture or design firms. Upon graduation, students are very successful in entering well-known offices in Chicago and throughout the country. The department also offers electives to the emerging practices of interiority. Transdisciplinary classes such as From the Physical to the Virtual, Performance and the Object, Fashion and Architecture: Clothing Us, Interactive Information Architecture, and Educative Exhibit Design, inform students' ideas. Spatial Imaging, Spatial Animation, Interactive Space, Virtual Space, and Web Architecture allow students to develop their work digitally, on video, on the web, and in CD ROMS. Design with Light, Design with Materials, and Design with Details are classes which inform students about the material aspects of space. Sketching Chicago, Design Drawing, and Perspective/Rendering introduce representational skills to emerging designers. Classical Literacy, Architectural Theory, Contemporary Issues in Twentieth-Century Design, History of Space, and History of Furniture are critical studies in interior architecture.
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