SOAD’s course ‘Stalking Beauty’ offers Service Learning in the Arts and wins Award

The School of Architecture and Design's UNIV 100 Class, Stalking Beauty, won first place for Service Learning in the Office of First Year Experience's UNIV 100 Showcase for their involvement in the McKinley Street Better Block last October.

The course was a vessel by which students found ways to identify the qualities of environments surrounding them. We engaged them in the process of looking at the everyday, and seeing it for what it really was and what it COULD be. The course objective is to contemplate the idea and the possibilities for beauty in and around the campus and city. We asked them, “What exactly constitutes the city you live in, and how does it affect YOU? What can YOU do to change it? How can YOU become the generator of beautiful ideas and actions?

It is through these questions we reached our main objective, and a proud one, which was the engagement in a Better Block for UL's Big Event. The Better Block Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that educates, equips, and empowers communities and their leaders to reshape and reactivate built environments to promote the growth of healthy and vibrant neighborhoods. For our students, we engaged in a rigorous process of having them collage their ideas for re-activation McKinley Street to be as they imagined. Beyond this, we then pinpointed certain moments on the street where they could further investigate more detailed solutions for development and infrastructural improvement. For the day of the Big Event, students implemented their ideas on McKinley Street. The public attended to witness what 150 student volunteers, a couple of helping hands from some community organizations, and a lot of passion and ingenuity can do in just several hours. One of the projects, a blank banner hung on a fence, was left for the community to freely and creatively infill throughout the Better Block event. Our students experienced design as a democratic process of many voices making up one. Though our class had six sections, each with around 25 students, no one is specifically credited, as we all, each of us, worked together as a collective to achieve the main objective of making McKinley Street a Better Block. As a result of the efforts of our students, volunteers, and community leaders, McKinley Street now has permanent string lighting to create a safer, brighter, and more beautiful urban environment for us all to enjoy. 

The course was taught by Sarah Young, Kiwana McClung, Liv Stevenson, Kelly Russo, Brad Domingue, and Nick Arcuri.