Christopher Frayling, then 47, had been teaching at the school on and off since 1972. The ambassadorial side of this job goes without saying, but someone had to shake things up, too. Frayling, a cultural historian by training, is in one sense an outsider at the RCA, where the tradition of the practitioner teacher is key. His staff consists almost entirely of artists and designers with studios and businesses that occupy at least half their time. The notion of pure crafts has gone.
Jewelers are concerned with ideas of gender and the body, for example.
Ceramicists work outside the crafts tradition. These disciplines are no longer ideas-free zones. Coates, along with partner Doug Branson, runs a practice that does everything from furniture and accessories to trendy sushi bars and, lately, major buildings, such as the new Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. But his department is still small, with only 40 students spread over the two years, and lacks diversity. Coates sees that as his only problem, though others might disagree.