CalArts: A School Goes to School

The California Institute for the Arts, CalArts, is housed in a 550,000-square-foot facility on a Valencia hilltop. Founded in 1961 by Walt Disney, CalArts has a world reputation in animation and in such ultra-high-tech arts as interactive video.

Enter the Northridge earthquake. As President Steven D. Lavine said in a recent letter to supporters, “everything that could break broke.” Wiring was ripped out of sound-mixing equipment as complex as a jet plane cockpit. Everywhere, wreckage.

And then the real blow fell. Two weeks after the earthquake, seismic experts reported that the main building--the basket in which CalArts had all its fragile, electronic eggs--was damaged badly and could not be returned to full service for months. A space of more than half a million square feet, and not just any kind of space: ultra-customized, high-tech space. It seemed nothing could begin to replace it.

As it happened, however, just up Interstate 5 from CalArts’ hilltop, Lockheed had a small industrial park standing, post-Cold War, almost empty. At a moment when every hour counted, Daniel M. Tellep, CEO of the aerospace giant, took just eight hours to decide that CalArts could move into 160,000 square feet of Lockheed space rent-free. The Getty Foundation, with equal speed, came up with $2 million to cover short-term moving costs. Here was an almost miraculous life preserver, but could it be seized?

Earlier, faculty members had moved their own and even their students’ files, equipment and work-in-progress out of the damaged main building and into tents. From the tents, the stuff was now moved into the Lockheed buildings and into an acre or two of trailers.

Meanwhile, word was getting out into a community, artistic and otherwise, that treasured this small but unique institution and didn’t want to lose it.

Magic Mountain, a neighbor, gave CalArts theater students free weekday use of its Magic Lantern theater. The Museum of Contemporary Art lent space in the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles for student art shows. Congregation Beth Shalom in Santa Clarita took in the music students. The list of rescuers has a score of such entries. CalArts, having sent its students as arts emissaries into the community, found its bridges busy with traffic running the other way.

Repairs are on schedule (not that the $18-million bill has been paid yet). Homecoming is scheduled for Aug. 1. And CalArts students have had the educational experience of a lifetime. Experience is what you need to make things go right. Experience is what you get when things go wrong. These students have had the rare luck to be enrolled when life took their school to school.