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COAST COLLEGE ART CENTER Home to both traditional fine arts and commercial arts, the Orange Coast College Art Center provides a cohesive arts facility that reconciles a unique site location and exemplifies cost effective design in a straightforward approach to functional requirements. Located in Costa Mesa on the Orange Coast Community College campus, the building resides among an eclectic mix of modern styles of architecture, organized in a campus master plan by Richard Neutra. Until the Center was constructed, various components of the art department were scattered across campus. The need and intent was to pull all divisions together into one 65,000 square-foot building, provide public gallery space, and at the same time have the building express some distinction between the art disciplines. The building scheme reconciles the 45-degree orientation of the campus with the orthogonal system of the city beyond, and consists of three compositionally and materially distinct elements that address the functional and identity needs of the Arts Department. The entry pavilion of the structure is a dramatic two-story volume with a steel and glass facade that presents an open face onto the quadrangle, inviting students inside. Aligned with the campus grid, the adjacent areas contain faculty offices and support spaces. The three-story main block of the building is constructed of cast-in-place concrete with corrugated metal siding and ribbon clerestory window infill, and consists of classrooms and studio labs, bisected through its full height by a clerestory sky-lit space. This central atrium connects all three stories visually and encourages interaction among the multiple art disciplines. The third element – most affiliated with traditional arts – is a masonry and steel industrial compound. This element, which houses heavier industrial uses, is separate from the main building both in construction and material vocabulary and is characterized by light colored, sandblasted concrete masonry block walls, steel framing, outdoor work yards and north-facing monitors the rhythmically bring light into inner studio spaces. The masonry block was selected as an important representation of the programmatic elements within the space, a maximization of the design presence of the 65,000 square-foot building, and for its inherent properties of durability and cost effectiveness. ARCHITECT: Steven Ehrlich Architects Steven Ehrlich, FAIA Cecily Young, AIA OWNER: Coast Community College District
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