Foundation Year: Three-Dimensional Design at The Cooper Union
Since 1999 Ashford has been teaching Three-Dimensional Design, a course considered a foundational learning experience relevant to all the disciplines in the School of Art. Shifting between the real problems of material fabrication and the ideal expectations of students’ imaginations, this class engages in how three dimensional thinking makes social re-invention possible. Accordingly, consciousness can be re-examined through the relationships already existing within built things: objects are stories about our relationships to each other, collections of how we value association, difference and rebellion. In a sense, Three-Dimensional Design proposes the autonomy we might demand in response to the built world. In designing a thing or event that takes up space or time, the class is asking how life could be organized and elevated; how one thing could be changed by another; the societal bodies and minds moved with them; what organizes and elevates our selves – what we can imagine we might feel.
