Expanding campus ambience in the city

College of the Arts’ addition to transform plot in industrial area

Go back in history, before the 1906 earthquake that remade San Francisco forever, and a glass manufacturer made bottles and jars near the corner of Irwin and Seventh streets. Fast-forward to the year 2000, and the fenced-off site mostly was used to wash off buses. Now it’s an empty lot, as flat as a dirt-covered lot can be, compacted and graded and prepped for the next role it will play in San Francisco’s evolution — home to maker studios and gathering space on the campus of California College of the Arts.

“We’ve all been looking at that plot of land for years and years,” said Stephen Beal, president of the 115-year-old arts college that, until this fall, also had an Oakland campus. “To see the reality of that soil waiting to be developed is incredible.”

JOHN KING

Like so many construction projects in the Bay Area, this one was put on hold because of the pandemic. Unlike some others, though, this one came back to life and should open in time for the 2024-25 academic year — an interlocked terrain of educational buildings and student spaces that will cover 2.3 acres extending west from the former bus maintenance building that has been the San Francisco home of the school since 1996.

The basic design remains much

the same as in 2019, with a landscaped entry plaza off Hooper Street between Seventh and Eighth. Turn to the left and there will be a courtyard framed by three airy buildings of structural timber rising from a shared concrete base. Straight ahead, wide amphitheater-like stairs will lead up to the roof of the base, which will hold a varied set of student spaces — including a garden that will feature plants used to make dyes for textiles, one of the design arts taught at the college.

The overlapped courtyards and plazas are intended to expand the sense of campus. This also explains the in-house name of “Double Ground.”

Plenty of details are different, however, such as the mix of the concrete and the thickness of the structural timber that will form the buildings rising from the base. In part, this was done to pursue the goal of making the extended campus as energyefficient as possible — not only the ongoing operations but also the energy consumed during construction. But there was another, more basic driver: the need to deal with the pandemicfueled cost increases.

“We had the time to look at what could be done in terms of means and methods to do things more efficiently here,” said architect Jeanne Gang, whose firm Studio Gang is the project designer.

Gang, though based in Chicago, is leaving her mark on the Bay Area: She designed the striking white Mira tower near the Embarcadero with its tightly corkscrewed bays, and has a 28-story apartment tower starting to emerge from the ground as part of the Giants’ multi-block Mission Rock project. There’s a complex with offices and housing in the works in San Jose, and Studio Gang’s reworking of Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz should open next year.

The firm won a competition to design the College of the Arts campus extension in 2016, and the schedule called for construction to begin in 2020. Instead, site preparation didn’t begin until this summer. The ground compaction machines showed up this week and thumped clean soil into place for one long and noisy week.

The new section of the college will have its own earthy, tactile ambience. The tall base will be board-formed concrete. The trio of buildings, two and three and four stories, will be structural timber inside and out, including cross-braces with a dark metallike stain to give architecture students a sense of the engineering involved in taking concepts from computer renderings to real life.

Rather than Mira’s white metal skin that reflects lights and shadows in different forms throughout the day, at California College of the Arts “it’s really just the structure that will be the aesthetic,” Gang said of the compound about to begin construction. “We wanted something natural and unpretentious.”

The new elements also will aim to capture the spirit of design adventure that has infused the adjacent structure — essentially a lean gaunt shed from 1951 — since its deft conversion into an arts education facility by the local firm Leddy Maytum Stacy. The central nave that students use for fashion shows and impromptu assembly space will line up with the extension’s central courtyard (“pulling the insides out of the building,” in Gang’s words). The circulation halls for the buildings will be outdoor walkways 11-feet wide, enough for students to gather or do individual artwork.

The extension will be the latest piece in the college’s effort to create a campus-like feel in a former light manufacturing area south of Showplace Square. It also has opened two residential buildings for students; one, Founders Hall, opened last year with a grid-like design by Stanley Saitowitz that plays off the skeletal modernism of the former bus maintenance building. It also aligns closely with the Hooper Street entrance that will be part of the expanded campus.

As to how all the details come together, a formal kickoff to the project is scheduled for midNovember. But by then, actual construction will be well under way.

“The pandemic was hard, there was so much uncertainty,” Beal said. “But it’s starting to feel like a campus already.”

Photos by Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle The California College of the Arts recently added its residences building to the school. Campus extension plans, including maker studios and gathering space, have begun after being put on hold due to the pandemic.

Architect Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang is leading the expansion project and designed it to be as energy-efficient as possible.

Studio Gang and Kilograph The new California College of the Arts campus facility includes a trio of buildings with structural timber featured inside and out, with a cross-brace design.