The Landing School: Professional Nautical Degree in Maine

In our walks around the New England, in the extreme US northeast, we had the opportunity to visit a school that unites fundamental courses for all those interested in the nautical world: yacht design, wooden boatbuilding, composite boatbuilding and also the rare marine systems course.

Located in a small town in the American state of Maine, The Landing School is more than a school. It’s a complete learning center for design and boatbuilding. It is also a community school, that has a nonprofit board of administration. Created in 1979 in a region close to na arm of the Kennebunk River, called “The Landing”, the school was named after the river but also in honor to the multiple yards that were in this region in between the 16th and the 20th centuries.

The School holds today, among lamination laboratories and naval carpentry shops, the four courses named above, each of them carried out along 10 months. Those are real immersions in their respective areas of knowledge, allowing the students to have plenty of practice and access to all the courseware available and created by the School. The courses are presented as an excellent way to qualify for the Market. In the Diploma version, in which the students choose one of the courses to get enrolled, acquiring the knowledge required for any job in the field. There’s also a bachelor’s degree option for enrollment, in which the students choose two courses and fills some more credits to be eligible to get in one of the two universities the School has partnerships: the Southampton Solent University, in the United Kingdom, and the Southern New Hampshire University, in the homonymous state, south Maine.

The director of admissions, Matthew Barry, who guided us in the Arundel campus, showed us many classes working in the lab-shops, that articulate themselves just as a single, integrated and multidisciplinary structure, where the workflow seems, at least for us as visitors, clear and natural. Altogether there are three carpentry shops in different sizes and purposes, a composite shop, where the students work from lamination tasks until painting and finishing and, in the middle of all this, there are a relaxing lounge for student’s acquaintanceship. The yacht design labs and the classrooms are all in the second floor of the main building, putting all together in a space that exhale nautical affairs.

Visiting this rich installation, we see that they are at the same time integrated, broad and diversified. They meet most of the youth requirements and expectations, qualifying and integrating them in a market that can yet be expanded a lot with this philosophy of education, and that brings joy and excitement to the shop floor. We, at BRANA, imagine an structure like this in Brazil and, just as The Landing School did and keeps doing in US since the late 70’s, that’s what we mean to do.