No school could have been more intentional about building design than the California College of the Arts. The planning took years.
It faced the formidable challenge of reimagining its century-old, 4-acre Arts and Crafts campus in Oakland. Its aging facilities — dedicated to glass-blowing, ceramics, and metal arts — couldn’t meet the demands of a digital age. Meanwhile, its San Francisco architecture and design campus, housed in a repurposed Greyhound bus terminal by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, offered an efficient but disconnected experience.
“We were struggling with the student experience,” recalled David Meckel, then Director of Campus Planning. “Students had to shuttle across the Bay Bridge for classes in Oakland, limiting interaction and community.”
In 2006, the board resolved to consolidate. A decade later, they selected Studio Gang, led by MacArthur fellow Jeanne Gang, to design a building that could fully support CCA’s distinctive, interdisciplinary curriculum.
The vision that emerged was bold: the building itself should be a teaching tool. “The design concept became straightforward,” said Steve Wiesenthal, head of Studio Gang’s San Francisco office.
The result: a textbook-green, $123-million, 82,300-square-foot structure with an exposed scaffold of engineered mass timber and steel that supports evolving art disciplines in flexible bays.
Opened last fall, the building in Potrero Hill is legible by design. Separated from the adjacent gabled mid-century building by a tree-lined courtyard, its 50,000-square-foot concrete base houses a lobby, workshops, maker studios, and a tool library. Above it, a green roof punctuated by two open-air courtyards brings light and air deep into the structure — and doubles as social space.
On the northwest corner, a three-story pavilion holds graduate studios and classrooms. Its mass timber-and-steel frame and seismic bracing define the architecture, while exterior hallways wrapped in balconies offer both shade and climate control. “This pavilion blocks wind, reduces energy use, and shades south-facing windows,” Wiesenthal says.
A single-story wing on the southwest corner houses the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, inviting the broader community into the academic realm.
Mass timber, with the lowest embodied carbon of any structural material used here, defines the building’s architectural expression. It may also feature the first exposed mass timber lateral system, verified by engineers at Arup.
Wiesenthal’s team planned for over 30 design disciplines — and more to come — separating noisy from quiet, dusty from clean, and heavy from light. “We created seven logical neighborhoods with community spaces embedded in landscaped sections,” he said.
Asked about sustainability, Gang quipped her addition would be “aggressively passive.” Meckel laughed. “It wasn’t hard to commit to that strategy.” And Gang delivered.
