South Campus
We’ve directed some of your questions about the impact of South Campus on Art Center to Patricia Oliver, the Vice President of Architecture and Planning.
Patricia writes:
“I consider the South Campus to be a success. We were given a collection of six buildings, all constructed at different times, with three separate structural systems. There are no two floor plates that line up with one another. Tackling this collective of buildings with the program that was needed and also making it a sustainable building was a very difficult task and working closely with our architects and contractors, we were able to get it completed at a reasonable cost.
We are currently working on Phase 2 of that project. The second phase includes building out the basement level, adding showers and locker rooms to support a commuter population, building out the Wind Tunnel space for use by the graduate students, and acoustical mitigation where we were unable to in Phase 1.
The building was the first LEED rated institutional building in Pasadena. It has won several awards for its architecture and for sustainability.
The South Campus anticipates growth in some of the graduate programs which are currently modest in size. There has long been a high demand for graduate study at Art Center. The graduate programs will have an opportunity to grow at the Wind Tunnel and basement levels of Raymond and from there we anticipate being able to expand onto the Power Plant site. That expansion will not occur until there is a large enough population to justify the move.”
Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Anonymous:
June 18th, 2008 at 5:06 pmI have a related question for Patricia Oliver - how has your office and the school learned from the mistakes made in the creation of the Sinclair Student Pavillion and the Prototype Classroom? How much money was spent on these projects and where did that money come from.
Patricia Oliver:
June 19th, 2008 at 2:13 pmThe Sinclaire Pavilion is an interesting case study. The pavilion was
intended to be for students. It was supposed to provide a place for them to gather and host activities that were not part of the mainstream curricular activities. Everyone was very intent on making sure that it represented what the students wanted. We held a weekend charette. There were several teams of students from almost all of the majors. The architects came and worked with the teams as well as several of the Environmental Design faculty. Each team presented their ideas and at the end of the charette all of the ideas were collected and made into a program. The students said:
1. They didn’t want to look back at the Ellwood building. They wanted to look out to the view.
2. They didn’t want air conditioning because they were in an air conditioned space all day.
3. They wanted a non-curated display space.
4. They wanted seating in an amphitheater format so that they could have meetings.
5. They wanted a small kitchen.
6. They wanted data lines.
7. They wanted to be able to show movies on summer evenings.
To ensure that the students interests were represented, the architects hired two environmental design students to work in the office on this project.
The project, including architects fees, was funded by private donations. The cost was just over $600K.
What we have learned form the pavilion is that the group of students that had input into the design graduated about the time the building was finished and the incoming students had a different view of what they wanted. The building is too hard and, although it is just a pavilion, not having heating limits its usefulness. We have plans to enclose it, add softer finishes and turn it into a more useful presentation/studio space. Heat for it will be provided by adding photovoltaics to the roof. The conversion is planned for next year, pending funding.
The prototype studios were an experiment. The intent was to create a series of conditions within a more open-studio environment to see if any of them would actually inform the way we created studio spaces in the future or if there was a different way of teaching than the repetitive studio/classroom of one size fits all. The open studios included heavily sound-proofed areas, sliding walls that would create both larger and smaller studio environments, small individual work areas, seminar spaces for 10 15 students, etc. There were also a whole series of “weird” furniture pieces that were intended to challenge the traditional teaching/learning environments by creating pieces that were more computer-centric. There were data drops every five feet which was a huge plus because no studios in the building had any data connection other than the labs (this was way before wire-less). There were individual student work stations that were designed to let students feel “enclosed” while working on their computers. There was a long “output” table that housed printers and video equipment, etc. The design is very similar to one that is now manufactured by Herman Miller, who had come to Art Center to see what we were up to. There was a table that was designed to allow an entire group to gather around it and simultaneously draw over images that were projected onto the surface. There was a portable rear-projection screen for presentations. A portable platform for groups working on their computers was designed to provide a digital classroom within a classroom. There were a few
light trees that aided the large quantity of hook-ups usually required for presentation when we were still dependent on video and slide projectors. And, finally, there were large stadium seating pieces that created a kind of instantaneous amphitheater for presentations. The furniture was never intended to be manufactured or fabricated in numbers. It was an study, an experiment, to see if we could create a new dynamic in the studio environment that might affect the way we teach and learn. The project was started before Richard Koshalek came to Art Center and finished within the first few months after he arrived. Given the changes in computer technology from 1998-99 to now, some of the crazy furniture pieces were prescient to what is available in the marketplace now. We learned a lot about what tolerances faculty have in the classroom: for instance, peripheral motion was much more of a distraction than ambient noise from adjacent classes. The stadium seating was a space hog, but they were great for presentations. When the Boeing project was going on, they piled the engineers from Boeing on the stadium seating and wheeled them from presentation to presentation. The light trees have been used extensively throughout the building for nearly nine years now. The desk with the projector was popular, but someone broke the lock and stole the projector, so it was decommissioned. The portable presentation screen got a lot of use for a couple of years and then that projector was also stolen. The equipment table got a lot of use and, as I mentioned earlier, there are many similar products on the market now. The computer stations were a total bust. I was a department chair when this project was started. I don’t know how it was funded.
— Patricia Oliver
Senior Vice President, Educational Planning and Architecture