First Look at Studio Gang’s Design for California College of the Arts
January 22, 2018
CCA is expanding its campus in the heart of San Francisco’s art and design district to create a new kind of space for makers and thinkers of all kinds—a campus that will redefine arts education for the twenty-first century. Unifying its programs in art, crafts, design, architecture, and writing, the new campus will create an innovative and vibrant institution in San Francisco that will have a powerful and lasting effect on cultural, social, and environmental issues.
Studio Gang’s design for the campus is conceived as a creative ecosystem that strengthens relationships between people, ideas, and practices. It extends the primary space of the existing San Francisco campus into a new campus yard framed by a layered “double ground” of art-making facilities and landscapes. The ground plane serves as a hub of indoor-outdoor maker spaces supporting more physically intensive practices. Its flexible open plan makes the different programs visible to one another, promoting interdisciplinary interactions and providing adaptability as new needs, uses, and technologies develop. Above, a second “ground” offers additional art-making spaces, outdoor classrooms, and informal social spaces—all visually and physically connected to the spaces below by a robust terraced landscape.
