Architect Samuel Mockbee started running Rural Studio in 1993 which brought young architects to rural Alabama. They would design houses, communities, baseball elds while living with the locals, and understanding their actual needs.
Inspired by the Rural Studio, John Bielenberg started Project M in 2003. Project M is a program designed to take young creative people into unfamiliar places, immerse themselves into a community, create a project, and execute it. It’s about inspiring creative people and encouraging self realization so that they may have a positive impact on the world.

Education is what is remained after you have forgotten what you learned in school. We believe that there is a more effective and fun way to embark onto the journey of life-long learning and prepare ourselves for the unpredictable future. This would be an opportunity for us and for you to experience different aspects of the world while creating an influential and exciting project to execute together.

Launching its first class in fall 2015, Secret Project is an immersive program allowing all students from all disciplines at California College of the Arts to work on real world challenges in partnership with clients, organizations, and companies in the Bay Area.

In the name of Secret Project Spring Break, we escaped to Greensboro, Alabama in late March, 2015. Over the course of one week, we realized how important it is to be submerged in unfamiliar places with both familiar and unfamiliar people alike. Now, we would like to partner with groups of people to unlock the ingenuity inside of us to achieve greater impact. After all, we are all born ingenious, right?

An escape into the unknown happened again this March. While wandering between California and Utah, a visit to the oldest and heaviest known living organisms Pando was made—the single living organism by identical genetic markers have one massive underground root system. Being surrounded by the interconnectedness of Pando trees, the concept of everything is connected is impossible to neglect.

When a project is so mysterious that no one knows what the project is, its future is exciting. Last year, after a long yet exciting search of potential partnership around the world, we were proud to present Secret Project Taiwan. Last summer, we lived together with blizters from di erent cultural backgrounds to think wrong, to challenge ourselves, to create change, and to produce an ingenious project.

Have you ever ridden a bike out of bamboo? Well now you can and you can build it your self. We built a bamboo bike building facility Taiwan. The studio is built next to a bamboo grove in the mountain out of two shipping containers.

Micro-grids are a great solution to incremental switching a energy system to multiple renewable energy sources. In Taiwan we are in the middle of a year long study with a educational farm to help scope and build a micro-grid which they can use to teach local schools how every is captured and stored.

This summer, collaborating with The Bay School, we will parachute ourselves in San Francisco, California. We will once again abandon restraints, forget about the so-called rules, and stretch and expand the our own limits.
* The fate of the project is entirely in our hands. We do not know how crazy this is going to get.

Learning to Learn

Education is what is remained after you have forgotten what you learned in school. We believe that there is a more effective and fun way to embark onto the journey of life-long learning and prepare ourselves for the unpredictable future.
This would be an opportunity for us and for you to experience different aspects of the world while creating an influential and exciting project to execute together.

Sound interesting? Then apply for our summer session today!
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Apply