California College of the Arts
Location
San Francisco, CA
Status
Under Construction
Client
California College of the Arts
Type
Cultural, Educational
Size
90,000 sf new construction
Sustainability
Targeting carbon neutrality and net-zero energy
Tags
The architecture will serve as a beacon for students and the public, drawing them toward its shared green spaces and amenities.
Studio Gang’s design for CCA’s new unified campus unlocks the potential of art and design education in the twenty-first century. The architecture connects disciplines in dynamic ways through a vibrant indoor-outdoor environment, offering a highly sustainable model for the future of creative practices.
Founded during the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century, CCA has grown to encompass 34 art and design disciplines, from jewelry and metal arts to textiles and ceramics. Unifying people and program and consolidating its two sites, the expanded San Francisco campus explores art and design as vehicles for positive social, cultural, and environmental impact.
An early model shows rectangular cut-outs between an upper and lower plane, revealing different programs and promoting interactions between the College’s disciplines, which are organized into seven “neighborhoods” based on shared pedagogical, experiential, and physical infrastructure needs.
Conceived as a creative ecosystem that strengthens relationships between people, ideas, and practices, the design extends the main academic building of the existing San Francisco campus into a new split-level yard of art-making facilities and layered landscapes. The lower plane serves as a hub of indoor-outdoor maker spaces supporting more physically intensive practices. Its open and flexible plan makes the different programs more visible to one another, promoting interdisciplinary interactions and providing adaptability as new needs, uses, and technologies develop.
The upper plane offers additional art-making spaces and outdoor classrooms, as well as informal social spaces—all visually and physically connected to the spaces below by a robust terraced landscape. Pavilions for art-making and learning rise from this plane, featuring deep balconies for exterior circulation, working, and socializing. Their exposed mass timber structure makes legible the physical forces and materials of the architecture.
Flexible maker spaces and shops are located next to each other on the lower plane, encouraging students to mix and share ideas in a variety of indoor-outdoor settings. Yards (such as the one shown here) bring daylight, fresh air, and views from above deep into these spaces.
Deep, covered walkways extend the buildings’ classroom, art-making, and social spaces outdoors. Framed by diagonal seismic braces, the self-shading walkways reduce the need for conditioned interior space, while showing off the forces and materiality of the mass timber structure — reinforcing the college’s mission as a place for making and design.
Flexible maker spaces and shops are located next to each other on the lower plane, encouraging students to mix and share ideas in a variety of indoor-outdoor settings. Yards (such as the one shown here) bring daylight, fresh air, and views from above deep into these spaces.
Together, this layered environment functions as a laboratory where students and faculty can explore sustainable materials, processes, and tools. Carved out of the lower plane, maker yards allow abundant fresh air and natural light to penetrate deep within the workshops. Other passive strategies, such as self-shading façades and night-flush ventilation, naturally cool the campus and reduce the size of mechanical systems. With the infrastructure in place to enable a closed-loop, net-positive campus in the future, the design is dedicated to supporting healthy, resilient spaces for art-making.
Through an abundance of public amenities, green space, and programs that seek to increase the impact of art in the wider community, the campus connects CCA not only to San Francisco’s design and innovation district but the city beyond.
Deep balconies, framed by the pavilions’ lightweight mass timber structure, extend education outdoors, reducing energy costs through solar shading, natural ventilation, and access to daylight.
Related
San Francisco Chronicle — "Timber! SF’s next architectural trend could be eco-friendly buildings made of wood"
"Touted by boosters as an eco-friendly alternative to concrete and steel, with a tactile warmth that theoretically makes for a more nurturing workplace, large buildings of structural timber have developed a cult following. . . The most visually striking of the projects will be the one at California College of the Arts."
California College of the Arts Wins Mass Timber Building Competition
The Governor’s Forest Management Task Force and the Office of Planning and Research announced California College of the Arts as a winner of a first-ever competition designed to highlight a category of engineered wood products known as mass timber.
