The wait is over for followers of Studio Gang’s campus expansion for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. The project, which was first announced in late 2016, establishes an overlapping "creative ecosystem" inside the footprint of the school's existing campus located in the heart of the city’s Design District.

The program adds a total of 82,305 square feet of space in the form of two hybrid mass timber pavilions set on top of a concrete slab base and sheltering both a makers yard area and other conditioned outdoor spaces used for fabricating and multidisciplinary design education.

The first, 24,300-square-foot Hooper Pavilion includes 48 art studios worth a total of 5,300 square feet. Along with those, there is a new 2,100-square-foot gallery for the exhibition students’ work, small lounge, another classroom space, and a 1,100-square-foot lecture hall with seating for up to 60 people.

The Hooper Pavilion is distinguished by its design’s exposed eccentric lateral brace frame. This is meant to express the seismic system and frame all three levels of exterior walkways while allowing light to penetrate more deeply into the building. Outside, the landscaped terrace unites the layered lower- and ground-level outdoor spaces, working also to reestablish the campus' connection with the streetscape and city beyond it.

This creates a situation in which student and faculty activities are made more visible and accessible to one another, promoting interaction between the CCA's 34 different academic programs. More physically intensive practices with heavy equipment are also deliberately placed closer to concentrate structural loads and mechanical infrastructure on the ground level.

Standing separately across from the Hooper Pavilion, the 5,200-square-foot Irwin Pavilion houses the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, adding a total of 2,900 square feet of galleries and supporting office space for staff there.

The hybrid mass timber structure used in both reduces the embodied carbon footprint of the project by almost half that of comparable designs. Studio Gang lists passive strategies such as self-shading facades and night-flush ventilation, along with a rooftop PV array, as part of its other highly sustainability credentials. 

Elsewhere in the region, the firm's new Verde residential project opened in early September. It joined their MIRA tower from 2020, which, along with the new three-building Kresge College at the University of California Santa Cruz, all precede another higher-ed project at Stanford with SCAPE and atelier ten that's expected to begin construction in 2026. 

Founder Jeanne Gang said finally she was "excited to see how our addition to CCA’s campus shapes the future of art and design."