Can you imagine if it looked like this? Nobody would play hooky any more.

The [High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, LA, California] campus will include four “academies” for education in music, dance, theater arts and visual arts, and a theater for 1,000 visitors which can be open to the public.
The theater lobby, a crystaline shape of glass and metal, that forms the public entrance to the theater, symbolically emphazises the openness of the school to the public and simultaneously serves as an exhibition space which can be linked to the visual arts studios and the event space on top of the tower.
The library is deliberately placed in the center of the school courtyard and rises as a truncated, asymmetrical cone with an oculus towards the sky. Through its central location and dynamic but centralized form this “Space of Knowledge” collects and enhances the energies which revolve in and around it.
The entrance for the day to day student use and the community is expressed through a grand staircase of urban scale and is oriented towards the community. (arcspace)

I couldn’t help thinking of the Elgin Academy when I saw this because their building is likewise for theater and art space (in addition to other things), and that image pictured above looks similar to the Elgin Academy site, grade-wise.

The high school in L.A. is by Coop Himmelb(l)au, and scheduled for completion this fall.

Filed under: architecture.
Follow responses to this entry through its RSS feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.