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Getting Centered
Looking to reach a larger community, Art Center College of Design hatches an audacious plan for a second campus--and a higher profile.

By Jade Chang
August/September 2003

The space is immense. There is an arched ceiling as high as a six-story building, and it's so long across that if you left, say, your soda at one end you'd be loathe to go back. Originally built by Douglas Aircraft in 1942 to serve as a wind tunnel for testing the company's planes, the Pasadena superbuilding is all timber--rare for a structure of this size--because reverberations from the wind tunnel would have crumbled any concrete. In the 1960s it passed to Dacor Corporation, an oven manufacturer that used the huge central structure as a factory and expanded as the company grew, eventually filling five tightly knit add-ons that are intricately linked to the first.

Now that the Art Center College of Design is taking over, a space that once held airplanes and ovens may soon be filled with Cirque du Soleil­p;style performance pieces, neighborhood parties, giant water tanks, epic teach-ins, and mini­p;monster truck rallies. It is mid-April and construction on the site, at the barely gritty southern edge of squeaky-clean Pasadena, is underway. Workers are cutting the first skylights into the soaring ceilings of the main space, sending down filtered shafts of sun. Eventually these apertures will span the roof and fill the hall with light. The five smaller buildings have been redesigned to hold studios, lecture rooms, and workshop spaces. Here Art Center will headquarter its graduate fine arts department and an extensive public education program: Saturday High and Art Center for Kids, serving students from 4th to 12th grade; Art Center at Night, for adult students; the Center for Design-Based Learning, an education initiative that works with local teachers; and the new Language Arts Program, an intensive ESL workshop. By August M.F.A. students will be able to move into their studios. By next January, the great hall will be ready for action, and Art Center will open its doors to the city and to the world.

But this is just phase one of a stunningly ambitious project that will take at least 15 years and seven phases to complete. In the end Art Center will have a new Pasadena campus for its public programs, an 80,000-square-foot museum/exhibition space, a renovation of its existing hilltop campus, and new buildings by Frank Gehry and Alvaro Siza--all designed to accommodate a more fluid curriculum and a new mandate of openness.

At one end of town is the new South Campus. Currently centered on reconstruction of the Dacor building, the South Raymond Street site also includes a student housing complex and the historic Glenarm Power Plant, which Gehry has signed on to turn into an exhibition space. Four and a half miles away--past the bustling commercial center of Pasadena, beyond the Rose Bowl, up a winding road, and folded between stately homes and overgrown hills--is the extant campus. If all goes according to plan, it will be transformed by the addition of two much needed new buildings: a library and a technical skills center, to be designed by Gehry and Siza respectively. It will be the first time that Siza, a Portuguese architect, has had a project constructed in the United States.

Founded in 1930 by Tink Adams, an ad man who was sick of the job-seeking art students who came into his office with an appalling lack of technical skills, Art Center was established as a professional school. Its signature 1976 Craig Ellwood building, a sleek black box hidden in the hills, was built to simulate a corporate environment. Simulation easily becomes reality for the college's graduates: half the cars in the world are designed by Art Center alumni, and former students have made their mark on products like Palm Pilot and Play Station. Though the college fulfilled its original purpose of "supplying wrists," it remained isolated in its hilltop sanctuary.

Enter Richard Koshalek. The affable and disarming recruit, appointed as president in 1999, provided a blast of inspiration for the stagnant college. The director of the Museum of Contemporary Art since 1982, he saw MOCA through the building of an Arata Isozaki­p;designed permanent home in downtown Los Angeles and the Gehry-designed Temporary Contemporary (now an ancillary space called the Geffen Contemporary), in nearby Little Tokyo. Koshalek is familiar with the maze of negotiations and the endless optimism essential to keeping any project going, and he has the courage to voice his expectations.

"We're providing an educational experiment," he says. "The world becomes the classroom. It's an audacious vision." As he talks he doodles on a white legal pad, punctuating his words with slashes of a thick black marker. "Public institutions often isolate their expertise. My feeling is that you can't do that anymore." He stops and considers the box that he's drawn, a minimalist's rendition of the central space in the new campus. "Along the way there's going to be a considerable amount of failure."

An art and design school is one of the few institutions that can really practice what it preaches and risk public failure for the greater good. Koshalek has spoken at the World Economic Forum at Davos on what he sees as the designer's role in the future: leader and activist. "At Art Center we want to develop among our students an awareness of the larger world around them," Koshalek says. But that doesn't just mean unleashing the students on the world--it also means welcoming the world into the school.

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Hilltop Campus above & South Campus below.
Courtesy Art Center College of Design
HILLTOP CAMPUS
A library designed by Frank Gehry and a technical skills center by Alvaro Siza will augment the Art Center College of Design's existing campus, in the leafy hills of residential Pasadena.
Courtesy Art Center College of Design
SOUTH CAMPUS
The Santa Monica-based firm Daly, Genik is renovating a conglomerate of six industrial buildings on Pasadena's South Raymond Street, four and a half miles from the hilltop campus. Across the street is the former Glenarm Power Plant, which Gehry will convert to an exhibition space for the college.
Courtesy Art Center College of Design
Daly, Genik will transform the former site of Douglas Aircraft's test wind tunnel (above) into a central event space (below).
Top, courtesy Daly Genik Architects; bottom, courtesy the archives, California Institute of Technology
The section drawing shows Daly, Genik's angular structure of skylights clad in Foiltec, a polycarbonate material that can control light and heat within the building.
Courtesy Daly Genik Architects
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