Columbia College Hollywood will raise its profile by expanding into a neighboring property with a new Center for Media Studies. Adding nearly 18,000 square feet to the existing campus, the Center for Media Studies will provide a variety of new venues for exhibition and production of moving pictures, as well as new classrooms, faculty offices and a student cafe. The expansion will redefine the CCH campus through unifying signage, an axial internal spine linking the adjoining buildings, and a new principal entrance. The Center will immediately draw students and passers-by, but perhaps more profoundly, it will locate CCH within a nodal constellation of art and film institutions across greater L.A. – and beyond.
Projection is a guiding principle, in terms of urban engagement, institutional expansion and design methodology. New spaces in the Media Center were developed by ‘scripting’ the cones of projection and reflection off a variety of screen locations to establish a cadence of moving pictures, and spaces tailored to them, through the new space. A series of major theater spaces form a ‘Brancusi Column’ running across the new building, with four new seminar screening rooms fanning off the theatrical spine. A black-box performance theater and a student café anchor either corner of the new interior. To bridge the differing interior elevations of the current West building and the new East building, the ground plane of the new building is terraced up to a 3’ high plinth, connecting the new teaching spaces and forming an internal boulevard for the school.
