East Los Angeles College – Arts Campus
The East Los Angeles College Performing and Fine Arts Center is a 160,000 SF complex made up of three buildings: Vincent Price Art Museum; Dance, Music and Visual Arts Building; and Theater Arts building and represents the second largest project in the Los Angeles Community College District’s $6 billion Sustainable Construction Program.
The Performing and Fine Arts Complex has several outdoor patios surrounding the three buildings – many with built-in seating – that serve as art areas, rehearsal space and informal performance areas. These accommodate students and guests while encouraging student collaboration and joint creativity across the various disciplines.
Arquitectonica clustered the buildings in a pinwheel rotation around a central green designed for cultural activities and student gatherings while creating a pedestrian quad and the semblance of “campus” within the sprawling circuitry of East Los Angeles. It is an art quadrangle and we wanted to show students that architecture is also an art form. No two elevations are alike, and the sculpted facades are broken up with flaring, irregular openings and floor-to-ceiling windows that follow the same angular geometries as the master plan. Rooflines are beveled and sloped to provide another kind of topography — one that reflects the tectonic uncertainty of the nearby Hacienda Hills — tilted and planar, rising to a full four-story height in places, dropping close to the ground in others. In contrast to the industrial gray exteriors, interior spaces have been color-coded to promote intuitive way-finding and to distinguish the different departments: orange for theater, blue for music, pink for art.
* AIA Miami | Award of Excellence in Architecture
* Community College Coalition of California | Award of Honor, Projects in Design
