Tag Archives: pasadena

Los Angeles Times praises Art Center’s “smart growth” to meet increased demand for fresh design talent

The newly purchased Mullin Building, at 1111 Arroyo Parkway

The newly purchased Mullin Building, at 1111 Arroyo Parkway

We’ve been talking with Los Angeles Times’ higher education reporter Larry Gordon for a few weeks  about businesses aiming to sharpen their competitive edge by hiring top design talent. Gordon was intrigued by the notion that corporate leaders have realized market domination in the new innovation economy requires a brain trust of superior design thinkers. Savvy consumers have become more and more discriminating in their choices when purchasing everything from smart phones to urban mobility devices.

Art Center’s record enrollment growth since 2009 is a clear signal of the global increase in demand for innovative design education. The booming interest in design also illustrates corporations’ recognition of the expanding importance of the creative professions to a healthy global business climate. And this increasingly design-centric paradigm is exemplified by Art Center’s continued physical expansion, with the completion of the new HQ for the Fine Art and Illustration Departments at 870 Raymond and the announcement of the purchase of the Mullin Building at 1111 Arroyo Parkway.

Read on to see what Gordon discovered in his conversations with Art Center students and faculty about how the recently opened “Post Office Building” is meeting their needs for light-filled visual art making spaces, and what President Lorne Buchman had to say about the College’s latest acquisition along Pasadena’s “Innovation Corridor.”

June 2014 alumni news and notes

Photograph by Damon Casarez for the New York Times

Photograph by Damon Casarez for the New York Times

From The New York Times to Esquire, from Cannes to the Venice Biennale — Art Center alums have been busy making, making headlines and making their talents known within some of the world’s most prestigious events, platforms and publications. In addition to this primer on their accomplishments, we’re also inviting the Art Center alumni community to nominate candidates for this year’s Art Center Alumni Awards. Read on to learn more.

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Art Center’s David Doody moonlights running mission control for NASA’S Cassini Saturn exploration

 

Cassini's ringed target: Saturn.

Cassini’s ringed target: Saturn.

“Right across the Arroyo, we’re making plans for a real close encounter,” says Dave Doody, whose Art Center At Night seminar, “Basics of Interplanetary Flight,” is currently recruiting participants for a class that’s literally out of this world. “My team has been piloting the gangly robot Cassini in wide orbits around Saturn since 2010. But in coming years we’re going to drop in for some up-close-and-personal visits. We’ll plunge the spacecraft between the rings and the planet 22 times before letting go of the spent machine so it can burn up in the gas giant’s atmosphere like a meteor.”

This 2016-2017 segment of Cassini’s 20 year mission has been temporarily dubbed the “Proximal Orbits” by mission planners at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Doody works as a senior engineer, currently leading the Saturn-bound spacecraft’s flight operations controllers. But after acknowledging that some creative person somewhere could almost certainly conjure a more mission-worthy name, NASA launched the Cassini Name Game, hoping for some better ideas.

“One thing about these orbits will be their huge roller coaster speed,” says Doody. “The camera-laden craft will reach more than 120,000 kilometers an hour as it screams past the innermost ring particles just above the hazy atmosphere. Next, it’ll slow down for three and a quarter days, coasting ‘up’ to the top of its 1.2 million kilometer-high peak, before starting to drop back in again for its next pass. Wild.”

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San Marino League hosts highly anticipated Art Walk XXVII to benefit Art Center, The Huntington

The San Marino League, a nonprofit organization of women committed to philanthropic work in the community, has been supporting fine arts in the San Gabriel Valley for almost 60 years. The League’s relationship with Art Center dates back to the College’s earliest days in Pasadena and to date the League has donated more than $580,000 to Art Center.

On Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. the League will host its biennial fundraiser, Art Walk XXVII, in appreciation of art, architecture and landscape design. A $40 ticket to Art Walk XXVII provides rare entry into four beautiful Pasadena homes and gardens and grants attendees access to amazing private art collections. The featured homes include a classic Mediterranean with Portuguese chimneys, an exquisitely restored Craftsman Japanese Farmhouse, a grandeur of French regency and a stunningly inspired French Provincial.

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View from the Bridge: A renovation designed for creation, innovation and collaboration

The 870 building at sunrise. Photo: Darin Johnstone Architects

The 870 building at sunrise. Photo: ©Lawrence Anderson/Esto

As a teacher, I understand well the difference a space can make in the quality of the educational experience. Space affects learning. It makes a difference in how people teach. It makes a difference in how people create.

Which is why when you embark on creating a new space, you want to get it right. You need to talk to the right people and to ask the right questions if you wish to build that place where students can thrive and where faculty will love teaching. You want the space to elevate the whole.

A lot of careful thought went into making sure the new Fine Art and Illustration building at South Campus, 870 S. Raymond Ave. would engender the highest quality teaching and learning possible. I have no doubt that the building will do exactly that. Move through the new space, and you can feel it. It’s buoyant. It’s alive. You feel open to experience, to learning, to discovery—all thanks to the environment itself.

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Innovate Pasadena: Ayzenberg Group traces its roots to Art Center

Ayzenberg Group lobby

Ayzenberg Group lobby

As Ayzenberg Group celebrates its 20th anniversary, founder and Art Center alum, Eric Ayzenberg, reflects on the dynamics that originally inspired him to plant his professional roots in Pasadena’s Innovation Corridor.

In the early 1990s, we brought a decade of advertising and design experience acquired from both the East and West Coasts to an up-and-coming area of great potential in Pasadena. With a small crew of like-minded souls I had met at Art Center College of Design and beyond, we purchased a spacious 15,000-square-foot studio on Walnut Street, plus an adjacent 5,000-square-foot space next door, and established our agency.

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Innovations in lunch: The ultimate South Campus dining guide

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It’s hard to overstate the excitement that greeted the announcement that a fleet of food trucks would be adding Art Center’s South Campus complex to its rotation of regular stops. Clusters of giddy staffers congregated around 8×10 flyers, speculating over which roach coaches– Holy Aioli? Kogi?  – would become the go-to lunch option within walking distance of 950 Raymond Avenue. Unfortunately, this culinary convoy was soon diverted away from South Campus, when turnout wasn’t big enough to justify a stop on the trucks’ lunch route.

On paper, this might have seemed a devastating blow to staffers as well as students tired of foraging for tasty eats in an industrial wasteland. South Campus sits at the heart of Pasadena’s Innovation Corridor, a name that may be more aspirational than descriptive of a neighborhood that houses a semi-functional power plant and a row of hulking industrial monuments to the last century’s love affair with molded concrete and steel. In other words, this is not exactly the kind of neighborhood where one might expect to find an operating vending machine, let alone a reasonably priced handcrafted meal.

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Pasadena green-lights Art Center student’s design for Armenian genocide memorial

Catherine Menard’s design for the Pasadena Armenian Genocide Memorial.

This week the Pasadena City Council unanimously approved the memorial designed by Art Center Environmental Design student Catherine Menard. The Los Angeles Times reported that more than 150 supporters attended the Sept. 9 meeting, including members of Pasadena’s large Armenian community.

Menard’s design concept was selected by the Pasadena Armenian Genocide Memorial Committee (PASAGMC) in January, at the conclusion of a two-phase competition. The monument will be built at a proposed site in Pasadena’s Memorial Park once PASAGMC completes its fundraising campaign. Dedication of the public artwork is set for April 2015, coinciding with 100th anniversary commemorations of the Armenian Genocide.

Related:

Art Center student wins Pasadena Armenian genocide memorial competition

Conscious Commuter mobilizes an e-bike revolution at The Design Accelerator

Gabriel Wartofsky with his electric bike at the Environmental Media Awards

Gabriel Wartofsky with his electric bike at the Environmental Media Awards.

When entrepreneurial inspiration strikes, it’s often described as the convergence of creative and commercial instincts. An innovator perceives a void in the marketplace and conceives a product or experience to fill that space and drive demand for more. But for Gabriel Wartofsky and Bob Vander Woude, that well-worn path into the startup trenches has been less clear-cut.

The partners have spent the past two years developing Conscious Commuter, a company built around an electric bicycle with a sleek design and long-range battery. However the whole enterprise is driven by nothing short of a mission to revolutionize transportation.“We’re solution providers,” declares Vander Woude, an entrepreneur and CEO of a seed-stage investment fund, who was looking to fund an electric bike company when he happened upon a web demo of Wartofsky’s senior thesis project, now the basis for their partnership, which aims to implement e-bike sharing systems in cities around the world. “We’re multi-modal. That’s the secret sauce. Other electric bike companies are not coming from the background of solving a social problem. They’re just motivated to get to a retailer and make money.”

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