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Teaching is undeniably a rewarding experience. But it can be a very frustrating one, as well. What, then, would possess a professor and five of her students to spend eight weeks together traveling cross-country?
“You have to be passionate about the topic," explains Linda Samuels (photo, right), a professor of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who conceived of, and organized, the Mobile Studio, a mobile curriculum of studio, seminar, and photography that hit the road during the spring semester of 2002.
Samuels and fourth-year students David Fish, Jedidiah Gant, Becky Joye, and Bill Sinkovic, and graduate student Couch Payne, traveled just under 9,000 miles during the course of their pedagogic experiment. Having already established a series of short-term collaborations with schools across the country, Samuels led her group from Charlotte and headed south, hooking up with students of the Rural Studio, Rice University, and Arizona State University, then up to Las Vegas for a short stay at UNLV and a trip to Los Angeles and another partnership with Woodbury University.
Samuels has always been interested in the subject
of mobility. “As an undergraduate, I did a studio project on tourist
housing, and I've always had this sort of tangential interest in postcards
and souvenirs—the idea of collecting data." She
went on to do her graduate thesis at Princeton on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Samuels had a couple of goals for the trip. First, to get where she wanted
to go and back. Not so simple when you've got six people crammed in an
S.U.V. for hours on end—and even less so when you've got an enormous,
custom-built trailer—the “satellite,"
as it was called—hitched to the back. The other goal was to get past
preconceived ideas about the road. “There are two big preconceptions
about the road, neither of which is true," Samuels explains. “The
first is a very romanticized notion that's been built up in literature
and on film. The other is the idea of the road, or more specifically highways,
as being this destructive force that's led to the devastation of so many
American cities."
“I think we achieved our goals, and others we developed along the way," Samuels admits. The success of the studio is also evident in the students' heightened interest in issues of mobility. Most developed their own thesis projects on topics as diverse as homelessness, multimodal transportation, and information technology and transportation. “Definitely!" is Samuels reply when asked if she's up for another eight weeks on the road—and as for her and her former students, “We still speak!"
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