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."
11 Comments
Since it's Cali it's not surprising to see an expressed braced frame but at first glance it was hard to tell that the braces were actually very dark stained timber and not HSS steel!
These photos make the braced frame geometry look so wonky when I know (hope?) it isn't.
Jeanne is from OMA so I tend to think the wonkyness is the intended aesthetic. It looks good to me. Low-key structural expressiveness a la Rem. My question is how they think it will age? Wood is not great when exposed.
About the braces, there is a lot of metal in CLT buildings, especially in braces and connections. You might be surprised. Hybrid structures are not intuitive if you have been working with steel or concrete or even timber frames (at small scale) for a long time. We are doing two CLT projects now in Japan that have opened our eyes quite a bit. Wood is an amazing material but the language of construction that goes with it is still in its infancy. This is a nice step into the water as far as that goes.
Agreed - regardless of overall aesthetic opinions the use of timber braces in a lateral seismic system in the US is pretty innovative. I can't think of another example. The detailing is a give away that the braces are indeed timber with a flitch plate and physical pin connection visible at each end of the braces.
I wish I could live in an ecosystem
I quite like this. It expands upon on postwar ideas introduced by the Alcoa Building and Paffard Keatinge-Clay's Bay Area projects. It's not one-liner like a lot of Gang projects.
Not the same structure at all, but there is a new mass timber tower going up at U of Toronto campus with absolutely massive timber braces, designed by the patkaus and MJMA. All wood. The steel connector at the center is amazing for its complexity and size. It's really big because the structure is cantilevering over an existing building (or at least that is how I am reading it).
With the Jeanne Gang project the structure looks more reasonable. It's all amazing stuff, but I think we are still figuring out a lot of this as we go.
I would assume if it's still being called "Academic Wood Tower" that the naming rights must still be available (for a price)!
Interesting project - here's more construction progress photos:
U of T: Academic Wood Tower | 77m | 14s | U of T | Patkau | Page 12 | UrbanToronto
what? No, it rolls off the tongue as it is.
Doug Ford's academic crack shack.
Producing crack students for the future of Canada!
I'm not sure why someone posted pics of their visit to a cafe with a Fiat in the lobby? The pastries look delish!
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