Word: visualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Faculty set up a standing committee, chaired by Jose Luis Sert, dean of the School of Architecture, to implement the recommendations of the Brown Report. The Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts (CPVA) then took charge of building Carpenter Center and further defining its educational philosophy...
...CERTAIN extent there existed external pressures to make art academic through a series of high-structured studio exercises. According to Eduard F. Sekler, Hooker Professor of Visual Art and now director of Carpenter Center, opposition to the idea of studio arts at Harvard was prevalent. In testifying before a Faculty committee on the creation of a new department, Sekler recalls being asked "And what is the discipline of your department?" And even though the building had been constructed and in use for five years, it was not until 1968 that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences agreed to grant this...
There was the feeling that Carpenter Center's role was to educate all Harvard students on visual matters. Underlying it was the belief that "visual illiteracy" accounted for much of the visual squalor present in the American environment, from its cities to its eating utensils. The task of the new design center was to make Harvard students more visually sensitive while they were still undergraduates. Then during their careers in business, industry, and government, when faced with decisions involving visual judment, they would be properly equipped to make them...
...CPVA decided that the new department would be concerned with "visual studies." In a statement to the Faculty Sekler described visual studies as the "manipulation of forms and media in a spirit of purposeful exploration, sometimes to an expressive end, but not necessarily with an aspiration towards the production of works of art--though not excluding that possibility which might come, on rare occasions, as a crowning reward." Clearly, the future government official would not feel out of place in the new department. Art would never be expected of him, merely the acquisition of skills of visual expression...
Conveniently enough, there already existed a series of basic design courses taught as part of the undergraduate concentration of architectural sciences. The Arch Sci department occupied a small building by the Charles River. Since this concentration was to be phased out and gradually replaced by courses in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), the obvious thing to do was to make its courses the core curriculum for the new Carpenter Center. And in fact, when Carpenter Center offered its first program in 1963, approximately half of its courses had been taken over from the old Arch Sci department...