Monday, September 07, 2015

the first version of design schools for automobiles, was correspondence.





and this was because very few guys could move to New York and afford to attend the Carriage Draftsmen and Mechanics school there.

Today, if you want to learn how to design cars, you have your choice of design schools, like Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, the Art Center College of Pasadena, Pratt in New York and schools in Italy, Japan and elsewhere, but it’s not a curriculum that’s offered at every college. You still have to move to New York or Detroit or Milan or Pasadena or one of the other cities with a design school.

In the 1880's, the only place in North America where you could learn how to design carriages was in New York City, at the Technical School for Carriage Draftsmen and Mechanics. Classes were taught at the Metropolitan Museum, three nights a week.

Because he had the most aptitude for not only learning and using his talent for design, but also teaching it, Andrew Johnson began his correspondence school for everyone who lived elsewhere in America.

Some of the most famous of his students are familiar names, Durant, Fisher, Nash, and Dietrich.

Andrew Johnson began his life in design at a carriage and sleigh company in Maine in 1870. Just the right time to learn everything there was to know about carriages, coachbuilding, and horse drawn wagons, and to be in the business as automobiles came along

He married the sleigh company owner's daughter, and was sent to New York's Technical School for Carriage Draftsmen and Mechanics where he won a scholarship from the National Carriage Builders Association to study in Paris under Dupont for carriage design

By age 30, he was working at Brewster and Co. of New York City, America’s most prestigious carriage maker, later to be known for their custom automobile bodies with unusual heart shaped radiator grilles

He became the Principal of the carriage school in New York, and then bought it.

The Fischer Brothers hired him to teach in Detroit's Cass Tech High School,


full gallery at http://rokemneedlearts.com/andrewjohnson/

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