Joëlle Jahn, École National Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs, Fall 2013
I always knew I wanted to be a designer. One of my favorite things to
do as a child was to paint. At the age of five, I started taking oil painting,
then moved on to watercolors, sculpture, you name it. My design interests
varied over the years; after textile design (around age six!) came jewelry
design, which ended shortly after me having to get seed beads removed from
my inner ear…(how did they get there?) Fashion design did not stick for that
long either. However, I grew up in Northern Germany, and loved all things in
Hamburg, a city with ever changing architecture and the most wonderful
interior restorations.
My fascination with buildings and the ability to breathe life into the
existing brought me to DEA at Cornell. On my first day of classes we had
presentations of students that had just returned from studying abroad, which
fostered my interest in the French Exchange at ENSAD to study in Paris. Two
years later, when the contracts between the schools were signed, I finally had
the chance to go!
I jumped on the plane across the pond in late August. Paris is beautiful
around this time of year. However, getting on the RER train to my residence
with two suitcases was a challenge! Upon my arrival, I of course got lost at
Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, the International Student Campus,
but eventually found the American house. I was placed in a large single room
with view onto Parc Montsouris and the lively Boulevard Jourdan. The park
behind the house was part of campus, filled with joggers, picnic-goers, soccer
players and weekly summer concerts. My floor mates were a wild mix of
American, Moroccan, French and Russian masters students. It was never a
boring day at the Fondation des États-Unis.
To kick off my semester in Paris, I did an internship before school
started in September. I worked as an Interior Architecture intern at a
Landscape Architecture firm, Interscène. There I coordinated a New York
themed exposition at the Palais de Tokyo, a hip contemporary art museum
near Trocadero. I attended meetings with the museum director and went on
site visits to plan the parcours of the exposition. The Palais de Tokyo is a
classical-style building with lots of structural damage because one of the
modern artists used explosives and decided to blow holes into the structural
columns for his exhibit. The exhibit proposed by Intersccène posed a few
problems since Thierry Huau, the head paysagiste of the firm, wanted to place
large trees inside of the building. But nevertheless, my internship was a
dynamic start into becoming more fluent in French and learning the Parisian
ways of hour long lunches and the wonder of espressos.
In October, when I finally got to start classes classes finally started, I
learned even more about the Parisian life. ENSAD, situated close to the
Pantheon in the 5ème arrondissement, is the site of some of France’s most
talented art students. The school teaches screen printing, textile design, set
design, fashion and interior architecture to name a few. It’s set in a beautiful
Philippe Stark building, with a winding red staircase that became my enemy
on Monday mornings when I had to get to the fourth floor for painting.
I studied Interior Architecture, which in Europe is pretty much the same
as Interior Design in the states. For course enroll, there was a whole day
dedicated to teachers presenting their classes and since I was enrolled in
4ème année, I was allowed to choose one art studio. I chose painting, of
course, and had my interior architecture studio as well as history of
architecture, lighting design, a site visit class and French class.
The site visit class took us all around Paris for five hours every Tuesday.
We visited construction sites of office spaces, hospitals and museums, often
with the very architect of the building. I especially loved the Musée de Paul
Belmondo, a house near west Paris’ Bois de Boulogne forest, that was
redesigned to be a sculpture museum. It had the most intricate parcours, that
led you upwards through staircases and alcoves with tactile aspects
throughout.
It showed how much learning is really done outside of the classroom.
ENSAD had a way of really engaging my senses in all my studies. For
the studio project, we did site visits for half the semester to the Musée d’art
et d’histoire du Judaïsme, a Jewish museum that we were redesigning for the
semester. My team did the site photography and lighting analysis. We went
through every room with one of Paris’s top lighting designers,who teaches at
ENSAD, and assessed the ambiguous lighting at the root of the problem. We
had special entry and photography privileges as ENSAD students, and knew
every nuance (and security guard!) of the museum by the end of the
semester.
Now that I am back in Ithaca, all I want to do is return to Paris. I loved
studying at ENSAD and soaking in the creativity. I experienced the culture first
hand and was fluent in French by the end. Living in Paris and being able to
go to all the museums for free was the best. My classes over there were so
typically Parisian and considerably less structured (professors and students
were consistently late!). That being said, the professors were some of the best
and involved in top design firms in Paris. I learned so much inside and
outside of the classroom, often by getting lost and finding myself in some of
the most beautiful courtyards and gardens. Even though it was only a
semester, I feel very fortunate to have gotten a glimpse of life in such a
beautiful culture and I would not hesitate to recommend this experience. Paris
I’ll be coming back for you!