History
The history of art, craft and design education in Taunton goes back to 1856 and the foundation of the art school in the wake of the 1851 Great Exhibition. This went on to become the Somerset College of Art. In 1898 a foundation stone of the Technical Institute was laid and in February 1900 the Institute was formally opened.
In 1956 work began on the present 15-acre (61,000 m2) site at Wellington Road, Taunton and by 1967 all departments were in situ. The College of Art relocated to an award winning building on the campus of the Somerset Technical College in the early 1970s and became the Soerset College of Arts and Technology.
In 2005 the circular, three story Atrium was opened, the latest phase of a £15 million redevelopment scheme. As well as incorporating a main reception and shopping mall area, information and guidance points, classrooms, and student common rooms, the Atrium houses the majority of the college’s Service Industries division.
Other developments in recent years have included a conference centre, nursery and a new Health and Social Care centre also completed in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Somerset College Of Arts And Technology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
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“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)