Day Six: Thursday: The drawing at the GE Crontonville campus
After a quick and impressive tour of the campus we found ourselves in front of a significant interior wall in the Learning Center. On this wall we had the challenge of trying to formulate an image that encapsulated some core principles of what the Crontoville location does and represents. The factors that directly influenced the decisions in the drawing are as follows:
During the tour we were introduced to the historical context of the Crontonville site itself. It's a remarkable story filled with visionaries who, starting as early as the thirties, were accumulating vast resources relating to fields of management and leadership. At its peak there was a library of over 7,000 manuscripts related to these fields and the Crontonville site was a global epicenter for management knowledge. GE aquired the site a few decades ago and continues the tradition of forming and training global leaders. For us, the simplest manifestation of the Crontonville legacy was a vast and grand library containing the collective printed wealth of close to 80 years of leadership training. It was reported to us that this fantastic visage of books does not exist anymore. But the mere thought of it remained with us and is represented in the mural.
We were inevitably impressed with the technological wonders of the tele-conferencing rooms -- but we also felt this deep desire to see thoughtful analog hints of the GE story at Crontonville told through a variety of mediums from prints to sculpture.
When we first started brainstorming about the mural the first terms we used to describe our interpretation of what was happening at the Crontonville site was "empire building" or "civilization building". We used these terms to pay homage to the idea that from this site, GE has long been creating generation after generation of leaders who have the capacity to affect the world. My partner and I are very aware of how important it is that these leaders are the best they can be, because their influence and decisions have a wide international impact.
To represent that in a drawing, we decided to go back to Civilization Building 101. One of the core things that most civilizations participate in is the creation of large monuments to display their core beliefs. The largest rocks are chosen and carved from these rocks are representation of things that they want their entire society to feel connected to. We decided that the statue should be human in form and in its hands it would hold a simple iconastic symbol of something related to the Crontonville mission. After a quick shoot-around with Peter Cavanaugh and Abigail Kagan, we concluded that we would have pen and paper be the objects being held. From these simple tools we see the foundations of innovation, communication and legacy building. Have an idea - write it down. Want to communicate - write it down. Want to tell your story - write it down. The pen, paper and volumes of the written page would be the thematic element that would run through the entire drawing.
We had heard the term "professionally human" used during our introduction to the Learning Center. The drawing we decided would show people working together to put the final touches on this larger-than-life statue, as well as accumulating knowledge in book format and building a substantial library of their history. To address the idea of how this knowledge is disseminated beyond the Crontonville campus, we added carrier pigeons to deliver the word. We wanted to reinforce the ideas of collaboration and teamwork and their collective results.
The drawing happens in a "natural space" shown by the shin-high grass spread throughout the drawing. We felt by adding this natural element we were allowing the drawing to connect with a more human element and divorce it from the confines of being strictly inside a more traditional work environment.
