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HYLAND must provide the student with the deepest possible understanding of the past, immersing him or her in the whole glory of the three As: art, architecture and artifacts. I was privileged, in the late 1980s, to receive a whirlwind version of this education by spending a year at Sotheby's Education, London, now the Sotheby's Institute. There we explored architecture as the backbone of all the more portable beauties of the made world. It was impossible to come away from such a course without a discerning eye: for form, structure, proportion and the more ineffable attributes of ornament and detail, of patina. If technology—AutoCAD, Revit, SketchUp and 3DMax- -is a cornerstone of contemporary education in interior design, so, too, must that education take the student on a sort of package Grand Tour of history. We recall that in the not so distant past, art students learned to draw by copying Old Masters in museum collections. There is much to be imbibed through imitation, for art looks always to antecedents, however original a new artist or work may be. A painter in the classical idiom may look to David or Ingres; the graffiti artist in East L.A. searches English Black Letters and Chinese ideograms. Interior design is an interestingly hybrid profession, partly that of architect, partly collector. The 1948 book by Francis Henry Taylor, The Taste of Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon, puts the case for an inborn trait in the great collector: "It is a complex and irrepressible expression of the inner individual, a