School Trip

On Wednesday and Thursday of this past week Adam, Sarah and I took a trip up to San Francisco to see Academy of the Art College where Adam is thinking of going after high school and is slated to attend a Summer Art Experience this summer. The school is open enrollment, founded in 1929, with twenty buildings throughout city, ten for housing and ten for academic studies. Most of the buildings are within a few blocks of Market Street, but they have shuttles running around to all of the buildings on a more or less continuous basis. For summer and scholarship consideration, Adam will need to submit a portfolio (and we had the opportunity to see a few examples).

What an interesting trip it was...

We got to see 'purple' mountains for the first time Wednesday on the trip up to San Francisco. The hills at the top of the grapevine (along I-5 just outside of Gorman coming from Southern California) are all kinds of interesting colors; green, orange, purple included. We all drove a little bit on the way up here, and everyone had a pretty good time as we laughed, joked and generally acted silly.

We stayed at Hotel Rex which isn't a bad place (it was very inexpensive for San Francisco), but it has the smallest and perhaps slowest elevator I've ever used. We had dinner at the Oaks inside the St. Francis. It was awful. I'd enjoyed the food in room service so much that I figured dinner would be great. Not even close and I'm not going to go into it. We ended up buying a full gallon of water Wednesday night after dinner, which was about a half gallon more than seemed appropriate. Oh well.

The Academy of the Arts buildings were everywhere, including one about a block from the hotel (this turned out to be one of the galleries). With all the times I've been to San Francisco in the last 16 years, I've never noticed one before. Wednesday I was noticing them everywhere. The main building is just a couple blocks from Moscone Center.

The first tour was for Fine Arts and Illustration. We got to see the four galleries operated by the school in San Francisco, and also had a chance to see several of the labs used by the illustration and painting students. Most classes used a sort of black bench instead of easels, which was odd (not seeing anyone use one, I'm not sure how it's done). Lot's of cool 3-D models were around, most of which are used as guides for future 2-D and 3-D illustration. So I guess illustrators need to learn clay modeling as well. Finally, we saw the building where the modern media classes are taught which is also the location of the schools software and email lab.

At lunch time we wandered over to see the Metreon, a SONY 'shopping experience' a couple blocks from the main school building (just around the corner from the north side of the Moscone Center). It was quite interesting. We spent a few minutes in the PlayStation store (Stephen gets a t-shirt), another few minutes in the Discovery Channel store and then wandered off to eat. After food, we checked out the SONY store. Lot's of cool gear to salivate over, but the thing that got Adam going the most was a picture of a Shelby Cobra 427. On the way back from lunch we hit the California Historical Society, where Sarah found a book for Jonathan and I found some cool old maps. They have one from 1858 that I really like.

While waiting for the Interior Architecture and Design tour to begin, we had a chance to watch a number of commercials done by students. I hate commercials but a couple stood out as being really well done (which says something if you know me). The tour crowd was decidedly female, as I think they were as confused about what 'Interior Architecture' means as I am. Adam, another father and I were the only males in the tour group. After the tour, I'm still pretty confused. There was a lot of traditional interior design stuff, but it went deeper than that. I'll have to do a lot more research to understand what it is that they are trying to teach kids to do. I was very impressed with one sophomore project, an excellent interior/exterior view of a home done from the artists view. It was stunning and I kept wandering back to look at it.

The ride home on Thursday evening was a bit odd. Adam wanted to see the Golden Gate bridge again (it's been about four years), so we went over it in sunlight, and came back over in a rainstorm with Adam taking pictures from the back of the van. I haven't looked at the pictures yet, but they ought to be interesting. We got caught in a bit of traffic getting out of town at 4PM. Worse, we got caught in a real mess on the other side of the bay (around Pleasanton on I-580) at about 5 PM.

Overall, it was well worth the trip and we all learned a few things. I'll put up the pictures when I get around to it.