Art Center Picks Site in Pasadena as New Home

Signaling an apparent end to a long search for a new campus, Art Center College of Design has selected a 10-acre site in Pasadena that includes a shuttered landmark electrical generating plant and a former Douglas Aircraft testing facility.

The elite, influential school, which produces many of the nation’s automotive and industrial designers, needs more room for studios, exhibitions and design classes. The school is considering expanding its enrollment beyond the current 1,200 students and hopes to add more programs for the public.

The site decision is significant for the city, which lobbied vigorously to keep Art Center in Pasadena. Seeking a campus with what college officials describe as “international impact,” Art Center initially planned to leave its home in the Linda Vista area of Pasadena. School leaders looked as far away as Orange County for a new campus and came close last year to leasing the former Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles.

The planned campus would fill two former industrial buildings with student studios and classrooms, a museum, a printing press and facilities for public education, including the Art Center for Kids program. The college also hopes to build as many as 80 units of student housing.

Art Center will retain its hilltop campus at Linda Vista, which is being expanded to include a new technical skills center designed by Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza and a new library designed by Santa Monica architect Frank Gehry.

The new campus would make Art Center into something “more than an academic institution,” said Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, adding that he sees the new campus “becoming a cultural resource [for the city] that lines up with organizations like the Norton Simon Museum, the Pacific Asia Museum and the Huntington Library.”

Art Center President Richard Koshalek likes the visibility and accessibility of the site at the north end of the Pasadena Freeway. With the new campus, Art Center “acquires a great centrality within the community,” Koshalek said, “while the public gets greater contact with issues of creativity.”

Gehry has agreed to redesign the most visible building in the new campus: the Classical-style Glenarm Power Plant on Fair Oaks Avenue and Glenarm Street. Built in phases from the 1920s through the 1940s, the plant is distinguished by a 65-foot smokestack and is still filled with massive turbines and other generating equipment.

Art Center officials hope to expand the 36,000-square-foot building, which has four underground floors, into a 100,000-square-foot arts facility through the addition of new mezzanines. The school is in exclusive negotiations with the city to lease the building for many years for only a nominal fee.

The new campus reprises the pairing of Koshalek and Gehry, who first collaborated in 1983 on the rehab of a Little Tokyo warehouse into what is now the Geffen Contemporary of the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, when Koshalek was the museum director. More recently, Gehry master-planned the expansion of the existing Art Center campus.

Art Center is in escrow on a five-acre site directly northeast of the power plant that contains an 87,000-square-foot building built by Douglas Aircraft during World War II and most recently occupied by Dacor, an oven and grill manufacturer. Escrow on the roughly $5-million purchase is scheduled to close in April.

The building is notable for a 17,000-square-foot wind tunnel in the basement, built to test aircraft, which may be converted to gallery spaces. The college hired Santa Monica architectural firm Daly Genik to master-plan the Dacor site and rehabilitate the Douglas Aircraft building.

Art Center plans to start moving public art education programs down from the hilltop campus into the former aircraft building by mid-2003. The building also will provide temporary housing for programs displaced on the Linda Vista campus when construction starts in 2005.

Conversion of the industrial buildings into art classrooms and studios is likely to be costly and time-consuming, particularly at the Pasadena Water and Power building. Soil surrounding the power plant contains traces of lead, and asbestos insulation can be found within the building.

Environment cleanup will take at least a year, said George Falardeau, Art Center’s senior vice president of real estate and operations.

Consultants are preparing a cost estimate, and the college is negotiating with city officials to determine what extent the city will help pay those costs.

Art Center’s quest for a new home started in 1999, shortly after Koshalek joined Art Center after his tenure at MOCA. Although the college did not seek to expand its small student enrollment, the existing building--a Modernist landmark by the late Craig Ellwood--was inflexible and did not provide large spaces for special course offerings, such as a recent seminar sponsored by Boeing that provided students with a full-scale mock-up of a Boeing 737 fuselage.

Although the college recently added several buildings to the campus, Koshalek said the resistance of homeowners in the surrounding neighborhood made large-scale expansion impossible.

For a while last year, Art Center appeared to be moving to downtown L.A. and was on the verge of leasing the old Terminal Annex on Alameda Street until college officials backed away from the deal, citing the high cost of converting the former postal facility into a school.

Pasadena officials, meanwhile, were lobbying Art Center to stay in town.

At the suggestion of a college trustee, Koshalek visited the power plant this year and was immediately impressed by it.

Getting Pasadena’s old power plant up and running again as a school will take at least until 2005, Falardeau said, and longer for the completion of all elements.

“Projects like this come along once in a lifetime,” he said.