The work more often copied than any other..."La Gioconda," some of which are still considered by their owners as originals and valued at over $3 million (Wallace 1966).

The institution as a literal work in progress is a theme fundamental to this thesis.  The idea of the art school grounded by a design that fosters an appreciation of the process as inherent to the spirit of the institution is an architectural premise that serves to surpass the convention sterility of many institutions.  To illustrate this concept, imagine the typical dance school or the multitude of urban neon “Tai Kwon Do” signs that grace the piano nobiles of the downtown core.  These domains could greatly enhance the animation of the urban experience if they were articulated with a scale closer to the pedestrian, or perhaps in an architectural manner that encouraged the pedestrian to observe these activities and participate in the process of the particular activity.  These processes are all but removed to a “behind closed doors,” second floor, back-room mentality that eliminates significant potential from the realm of the urban hierarchy, and in particular the street.  Even our own school of architecture, a 24-hour operation, boasts only a single studio clearly visible from the street denying the campus from a potentially dynamic and captivating glimpse of the process that lies within.  A dance studio observed as a work in progress, say from a bar stool in a café, offers an experience parallel, if not superior to, the formal annual production at the velvet endowed theatre.  Even on an amateur level, the observation of children doing their clumsy chubby arabesques or vicious round-house kicks is an urban dynamic that could do much to amplify the mundane after-hours silence of many streets in our city.  The recent completion of the renovation to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) is one such local example of this reciprocity to the street.  Indeed, it is the only animation of the Peel St. segment between Sherbrooke and deMaisonneuve.  In this example, the gymnasium affronts directly the street level enabling passersby to observe the raw vanity of the body-builders within cycling to nowhere, and the exercise machines can likewise observe the lethargy and rancidity of the pedestrians rushing from Point A to Point B with cigarette smoke and java steam defining their wake.

I challenge the distillery of urban shadows with a direct application to the art institute: that the process embedded within reigns superior to the final product that the gallery represents to the institute.  The fostering of the artist's development should be elevated beyond the periodical exhibition in the lobby and an $11.95 serial publication that is on sale at the reception.  For lack of a more appropriate cliché, examine the likes of artist such as Lionardo di Vinci as representative of the spirit the “Treasury of Shadow” should strive to accommodate.  This was a man who retains “a certain mystery in his work, something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels” (Pater 1912, 90).  He seemed perhaps more than any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within so that he to his contemporaries to be “the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom” (Pater 1912; 91).  His character was such that his beauty was captivated by his artistic spirit that inspired him to improvise music and songs, buy caged birds and set them free as he walked the streets if Florence, fond of odd bright dresses, spirited horses and particularly the recurring themes of smiling women and the motion of great waters.  His respect of the process was reserved elitistly in that he would never work until the arrival of that moment of “bien-être,” which to the imaginative is a moment of invention. 
 

On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation or after-taste of it.  Few men distinguish between them as jealously as he did.  Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work.  But for Lionardo the distinction is absolute, in the moment of bien-être, the alchemy complete; the idea is stricken into colour and imagery; a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul (Pater, 1912, 107).

Although I am not directly suggesting the artistic process necessitates specific qualification, I offer Lionardo as a parameter elected to remind and confirm the potential of the institute and its spiritual foundation.  It is a redundant doctrine; parallel perhaps to an embroidered “Home Sweet Home” plaque on the wall, or some  laminated dime-a-dozen tasseled bookmark that states the proverb “Love Thy Neighbour” in a tawdry pastel font.  It is not that I am wrestling the obvious for all it is worth, it is simply an emphatic reminder and benchmark for the spirit of the institution's progress, and, as such, cannot be overstated.  In fact, I am going to suggest that it has not.  I offer one last Lionardo proverb in an attempt to document the intrinsic power this institution is to house.  Although it is at the risk clinching and compounding the eye-rolling cliché, this is perhaps the most compelling descriptions of the infamous unfathomable smile of “La Gioconda,” the unquestionable masterpiece of Lionardo di Vinci; the revealing instance of his mode and thought and work:
 

The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire.  Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary.  It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.  Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! […]  She is older that the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been the diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all of this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands.  The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.  Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea  (Pater 1912,119).