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Founded in 1927 by the architect and designer Henry van de Velde, the École Nationale supérieure des arts visuels of La Cambre (ENSAV) has nearly 700 students in 18 different departments: ceramics, animation, drawing, urban design, engraving, and the printed image, painting, photography, sculpture, and an art restoration department. Its design departments include industrial and textile design, book design and bookbinding, interior design, set design, fashion, accessories design, and graphic and visual communication and typography. Since the fall of 2016, the school also offers a new creative writing workshop (a continuous two-cycle program, taught in the evenings and on Saturdays, 30 study credits.) Students attend several cross-disciplinary courses, optional and compulsory, including the digital arts, life drawing, color, video, physical practice and performance, book art, and illustration. Along with their artistic studies, students study both theory and technique, general and specialized. They are encouraged to attend outside courses, including the Erasmus student exchange program, assisting working artists, and studying at arts centers, agencies, and commercial companies. Courses are spread over five years and divided into two cycles: Bachelor’s (180 credits) and Master’s (120 credits) levels. The school also offers a post-graduate degree – for those interested in a teaching career – and offers students Ph.D. preparation in Arts and Art Sciences, co-organized with the University. Outside the regular courses, the school offers a preparatory class during the school year and a summer school class, both of which are for students in their senior year of high school/ secondary school interested in studying the arts at an institution of higher learning. La Cambre is a graduate and post-graduate school for the arts (ESA) organized by the Brussels Wallonia Federation. The school is part of the Brussels Academic pole – the cluster of higher learning institutions in the region – and the cross-disciplinary Artes platform, including the Brussels Royal Conservatory and INSAS (film, music, theatre). It has developed a solid partnership with the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in research and individual classes. La Cambre regularly participates in national and international partnerships, institutional, educational, artistic, socio-cultural, industrial, and commercial, each of which feeds into and becomes part of its teaching structure. The school is located on the historic eponymous site of the Abbey of La Cambre. In the 1980s, it expanded to two nearby sites. The school has a great library and a significant archive collection, including the graphic and photographic work of its founder, Henry van de Velde. La Cambre also builds on its collection of student and teacher work, organizes many public events (lectures, exhibitions, fashion shows …), and regularly publishes books and essays. Several associations contribute to La Cambre’s dynamism and outreach, including Les Amis de La Cambre, the Atelier de production de La Cambre, La Cambre-Mode(s) Fonds Henry van de Velde. In the fields of the plastic and visual arts and space, La Cambre is the leading higher education and graduate Arts school of the Wallonia Brussels Federation in the capital of Belgium and Europe. Its political and cultural situation contributes to its commitment to quality, diverse education. Also, La Cambre recognizes its place in avant-garde history, which is part of its past. La Cambre is a state educational institution, and as such, it offers a wide range of specialized studies. A priority at La Cambre is creation, whether in the learning of knowledge or perfecting skills and practices. The school prepares students to perform the artistic functions essential to society in activities already recognized and to come. The school espouses no agenda nor any particular movement or trend, but it does include in its programs the questions which permeate contemporary society; it is a safe space for reflection and exchange. The departments encourage commitment to our shared values: a capacity for initiative and invention, autonomy, competence, knowledge, a critical eye, personal authenticity, and social awareness. Studies at La Cambre include two essential components: reinforcement and the spirit of openness. The student who is admitted to first cycle studies enters a specific artistic program, in which compulsory courses are supplemented by periods of reflection, something which will continue throughout his or her studies, strengthening and reinforcing his or her commitment. Students become aware of the specificities of their chosen medium as they move inevitably toward artistic autonomy. Reinforcement is balanced by the spirit of openness, particularly in the exercise of cross-disciplinarity that La Cambre offers, based on the concept of free will and individual commitment. Going beyond the departments, the names, the reflection of the zeitgeist -- as La Cambre has always reflected significant trends in art, creation, and ways of thinking -- and attitude and a way of approaching the world characterize the school: a huge multi-cultural melting pot, a great commotion, intercutting passages, the vigor of ideologies, high standards of thought, a demand for coherence, the dimension of dreams … and all the avatars of imagination. View full university