Content area
Full Text
Marcel Duchamp famously put a signature on a urinal, transforming a found object into a work of art suitable for displaying. But at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, the objet trouve for architects Daly Genik was a wind tunnel. For the first structure of the school's fledgling South Campus, the Santa Monica architects transformed a huge World War II-era artifact into a building suitable for making art.
Art Center, best known for producing the world's foremost car designers, has long occupied a building by Craig Ellwood: a svelte, Miesian, bridgelike structure that spans a gully in the Linda Vista hills above Pasadena. Embodying a pristine, idealized vision of architectural beauty, this essentially classical building in bucolic seclusion represents the Modernist version of the ivory tower.
Art Center's president, Richard Koshalek, a former director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has long embraced architecture's potential to define and shape institutions. From the outset of his term as president, five years ago, he launched a building program that would take the college off the hill and into the community, engaging a broader and more visible public forum--while pivoting the institution invitingly toward Cal Tech, its crosstown colleague.
The new South Campus was predicated on a curriculum primarily of night extension courses, with a graduate fine arts program and various forms of academic and community outreach. Here, the wind tunnel--originally constructed to test airplane aerodynamics--stood amid vacant industrial buildings in a once neglected area of the city. The 90,000-square-foot, $18.8 million adaptive reuse project, as Daly Genik envisioned it, would shift Art Center's image from the polished, self-contained box on the hill toward the unfinished character of an exposed concrete armature, open to continual change and reinterpretation. In essence, the concept favored the raw over the cooked.
In its new public role, the building would need a strong street presence, requiring more than a passive cleanup of the self-contained and massive volume. Confronting...