The California College of the Arts (CCA) has lived many lives since it was founded by Frederick Meyer in 1907. Then known as the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts, it set up shop in the Studio Building in downtown Berkeley with just 43 students enrolled. In 1922, Meyer relocated the campus to Oakland’s James Treadwell estate, where it would remain for the next hundred years. Along the way, the CCA converted a former Greyhound bus maintenance facility into a second hub in San Francisco’s burgeoning Design District in 1996. The school has since grown to accommodate a student body of nearly 1,400 across 34 art and design disciplines, from jewelry, ceramics, and textiles to metal arts, architecture and animation.
Until recently, programs were split between the two cities, forcing students to commute back and forth. With the more traditional craft-based studios located primarily in Oakland, and the design and technology-driven facilities in San Francisco, the school’s interdisciplinary ethos became increasingly fragmented. For this reason (and many others), the CCA opted to close its Oakland location in May 2022.
The decision was met with concern from students, faculty and residents about what would happen to the beloved campus and how the neighbourhood would be impacted. The initial plans, developed with the Emerald Fund and Equity Community Builders, called for the demolition of 10 buildings to create 589 housing units, a 19-storey residential tower and 35 artist homes in a refurbished dorm. But the San Francisco Business Times reported that the project is now on hold for economic reasons.
In the meantime, the CCA’s San Francisco campus will have big shoes to fill. To accommodate the influx of new students, the school tapped Studio Gang to design an addition to the main academic building (and reprogram the existing space). The firm is no stranger to creating innovative buildings for higher education and arts institutions, having recently completed the University of Chicago Campus North Residential Commons and the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, to name a few. For the CCA, Studio Gang conceived a striking hybrid mass timber extension which opened in time for the Fall 2024 semester, adding nearly 7,650 square metres of art-making facilities, learning spaces and green spaces to the campus.
From the public plaza, the building’s two exposed mass timber pavilions — among the first such structures in California — stand out from the industrial context with an architectural language all their own. Their novel lateral brace system is expressed on the building façades as a graphic x-shaped pattern, rendered in blackened wood. This structural element frames the deep exterior walkways that surround the building, whose benefits are threefold: they provide shade to the interior, reduce energy use by minimizing enclosed conditioned space and create informal secondary spaces for working and socializing, allowing the vibrant student life inside to radiate outwards. Inside, the pavilions house classrooms, art studios and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
The mass timber structures sit atop a solid concrete base with a flexible open plan that fosters interdisciplinary learning through sightlines between the different programs. “The design intends to create a dynamic environment for art and design education, while also inspiring new forms of making through unexpected interactions between disciplines,” explains Jeanne Gang, founding partner of Studio Gang.
Shared materials and workshops are arranged across the ground floor, where facilities support large-scale fabrication and physically intensive creative practices. (This strategic move concentrates structural loads and mechanical infrastructure on the ground level). The spaces are designed to be adaptable as the school’s needs change.
The interior’s exposed finishes take on the industrial quality of its context, and boast the additional benefit of cutting the building’s embodied carbon footprint by almost half of a typical building. The theme of indoor-outdoor workspaces runs throughout: Here, two large maker yards carved out of the lower level extend the workshop facilities while also allowing fresh air and natural light into the centre of the deep floor plate.
Though the lower and upper levels differ in their materiality and spatial planning, they are unified by a biodiverse landscape that connects them. Part plaza, part garden, the public space makes for a rich addition to the campus where people can gather — and provides a prime view into the maker yards, where student work is on open display, and furthers the social ethos of the interior. In this way, the community becomes a part of the school, and the school a part of the community.
In anticipation of future expansion, the firm has designed a third mass-timber pavilion within the city, giving the CCA ample room to grow. The San Francisco campus may not embody the old-world charm of its Oakland predecessor, but with a sustainable, functional and beautiful new home, the school is well-positioned to enter its next chapter.
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