ENSAD
Public arts school in Paris / Twinned with the School of Visual Arts in New York under the Foundation’s Franco-American exchange programme.
Founded at the close of the 18th century out of the former Royal Free Arts School created by Jean-Jacques Bachelier, this is the place where the great architect Viollet-le-Duc himself chose to study. Accolade enough, but the list of famous alumni of the Higher National School of Decorative Arts – aka Arts déco or ENSAD – goes on and on: from Rosa Bonheur to Annette Messager, Matisse to Pierre Huyghe, Picabia to Xavier Veilhan, Jean-Paul Goude to the graphic duo M/M. On top of which, one of its most eminent directors was none other than Roger Talon. One of France’s well-known grandes écoles – the elite state-funded universities.
ENSAD offers five year courses leading to degrees in interior design, graphic art, industrial design, set design, illustration, video-making and so on. “Teaching throughout the course is built around design and plastic expression, art history and the human sciences, as well as digitisation and computers,” the school’s website reads. “Students are taught the techniques of conceptualisation in a professional setting. They work in teams on multi-disciplinary projects bringing together all their various disciplines.” After completing the course, students are given a state diploma recognising them as a ‘creator-designer’ in one of several fields: interior architecture, outdoor art, graphic design/ multimedia, object design, textile design, clothes design, printed image, photo-video, set design etc. The school also offers a number of international exchanges (via the Erasmus-Socrates programme in Europe for example), as well as joint teaching partnerships with French schools and universities, link-ups with well-kown businesses and institutions, foreign study trips etc. Based in the rue d’Ulm since the 1920s, the school was recently renovated by the arhicitect Luc Arsène-Henry with the designer Philippe Starck and the landscape-artist Pascal Cribier.
