According to CBS News, which profiled him on 60 minutes, Stilgoe “teaches the art of exploration and discovering the built environment - everything from architectural history to advertising and design. He introduces his students to a method of discovering a hidden world that's always been right in plain view.
“ ‘I start by showing slides of things that they think they have seen, and it turns out they haven't seen. The white arrow that's on the side of every Fed Ex truck is a nice place to start. Almost everybody's seen a Federal Express truck, almost nobody's seen the white arrow,’ says Stilgoe.”Mr. Stilgoe is currently teaching a seminar at Harvard called “Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871 to 2036.” Here’s the course description:
“Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and private and public policy.”
John Stilgoe’s website, link.
CBS News article, link.
