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The Designer-Led Summer School Where the Students Are the Teachers
Ellipsis Open School is all about the Portuguese countryside, exposure to other disciplines, and making “a temporary community”
By Meg Miller
This is the first installment in a series of articles that each focus on a summer school, residency, or alternate education model that seem particularly relevant to designers. The hope is that, together, these articles will give a broader view of non-traditional schools and designers invested in continued learning. Here, we take a look at Ellipsis Open School, an alternative school in the south of Portugal that its founder, Eva Gonçalves, describes as something between “a summer school, an art residency, a lecture series, and a temporary community.”
In the spring of 2017, Eva Gonçalves had just returned to Berlin from North Carolina, where she was attending a school-slash-residency program called School of the Alternative. The program is housed on the original campus of Black Mountain College, the experimental school famous as much for its influence on art education as for its faculty and students, which included Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Buckminster Fuller, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg. Much like its predecessor, the new Black Mountain School…
