Design School Will Try a New Angle--Low Tuition : Up to 60 students will learn art techniques in vacant hangars at Santa Monica Airport--for $100 a year

Educations in design don’t come cheap. Basic tuition for a year at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena is $15,000. At Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, it’s $9,800.

This fall, a new design school at Santa Monica College will buck the high price norm, but its creators say it certainly will not be a discount knockoff. The core faculty includes such local notables as artist Laddie John Dill and designer Robert Wilhite, and the visiting roster includes such heavy hitters as artists Alexis Smith, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and John Baldessari.

The site for the new Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture is also impressive. Students will meet and do studio work in cavernous, now-empty hangars and office buildings at Santa Monica Airport. Classes will be small and school enrollment will be limited to 60.

But the yearly tuition will be $100.

“It made me angry that the great schools turning out the great designers are institutions in the private sector that cost $10,000 to $25,000 per year in tuition,” said Richard Moore, president of Santa Monica College, who five years ago started planning the new school. “It’s crazy and it’s not good public policy. It shuts out too many talented people.”

The aim of the new school will be to provide students with practical training that would prepare them to go straight to work as a designer or on to a specialty school for more education. The big public universities, Moore said, are geared to teaching the fine arts and don’t get that involved in professional design programs, especially on the undergraduate level.

“I wanted to see if we could set up something here, in a public institution that would provide a great education in an exciting atmosphere for a lot less money,” Moore said.

Moore and the other creators of the new school at Santa Monica College are aiming high.

“Our models were Bauhaus and Black Mountain,” said Joan Abrahamson, the director of the school, referring to two of the landmark experimental arts schools of the century. Passing through Germany’s Bauhaus, which existed from 1919-33, were artists Josef Albers and Paul Klee and architect Mies van der Rohe. Black Mountain, started in North Carolina in 1933 to continue on the Bauhaus ideal, had on its roster composer John Cage, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning and futurist and designer Buckminster Fuller.

“These institutions had a profound impact on the arts world,” said Abrahamson as she walked through some empty hangars that will be used by students as studios and classrooms. “They brought together great people in a kind of critical mass that produced an intense interaction. These schools were crucibles for creativity.”

Both she and Moore said that to a great extent they base their expectations on the caliber of the faculty they were able to attract. Many of the artists who will be teaching live or work on the Westside. “I don’t think you could pull this off in Fresno,” Moore said.

It also could not be pulled off without a subsidy. The cost of putting together the program for the first year is about $250,000, Moore said. The tuition fees will only cover $6,000 of the total, with the rest coming out of the college’s $50-million budget provided by the state. “We can grow 1% a year,” Moore said. “The funds for the new school come out of that growth money.”

The faculty, which also includes artist Jill Giegerich, architect Jeffrey Daniels and designers Roland Young and Deborah Sussman, will be paid the college’s regular rate of $30 a class session.

Although the models are Bauhaus and Black Mountain, the new school has to adhere to the state’s requirements for a community college curriculum. The art-design-architecture students will have to take general requirement classes, but Abrahamson has given them an arts slant. For example, the biology class will be called “Patterns in Nature,” and will focus on the beauty of biological design. The physics class will be “The Built World,” the business course will be “The Business of Design,” and the psychology class will be “The Psychology of Perception.”

The required language class will be Italian, “because that is the language of design,” Abrahamson said. “I think if everyone can speak the same foreign language, it will increase the sense of community.” They also will be able to enjoy good meals. The language class is called “Al Dente: Basic Italian Cooking,” and cooking will be done in class.

“A lot of this is about making a community,” Abrahamson said. She wants the 60 students, who were chosen out of 500 applicants (all of whom were required to submit a portfolio of their artwork) to feel that they are all having a shared, special experience in making art.

“That is what Black Mountain was all about. Those people supported each other, learned from each other, bounced ideas off each other until together, they changed art.”

Abrahamson, who said she is “thirtysomething,” has a resume that could choke a headhunter. Her degrees, which come from Yale, Stanford, Harvard and UC Berkeley, are in fine arts, philosophy, psychology, education, law and learning environments. She spearheaded the effort to get military land at Ft. Mason in San Francisco turned over to the National Park Service and designated an arts and learning center. As a White House fellow, she worked for then-Vice President George Bush and was hired by the United Nations to work in Europe for its Human Rights Commission and for UNESCO.

In 1985, she was awarded one of the MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”

Currently, she is president of the Jefferson Institute, a public policy group she founded that tackles urban and other problems, and is chairman of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. Finally, she is a painter and songwriter, and with her husband, who is a professor of international relations at USC, she is raising two children.

“When the advisory committee asked me if I would be director of the school, I said, ‘I have enough to do as it is!’ ” she said.

But the board was persistent and she eventually agreed to head the project through at least its first year.

Abrahamson walked into one of the airport hangars, which is soon to undergo sandblasting in preparation for its transformation into studio space. But for now it’s a vast, empty space, with sunlight through dirty windows illuminating the peeling paint, wood beams and a dramatically arched roof.

“Bauhaus and Black Mountain didn’t last that long, but their influence is still being felt,” said Abrahamson as she walked out into the middle of the hangar and turned in a circle, looking at the empty hangar.

“It would be wonderful,” she said quietly, “if we could create that kind of school, here.”