Media Center at Columbia College Hollywood

Winner of a citation in the 2017 P/A Awards

“I like institutional buildings that do not feel like they’ve been designed by committee. Taking the projection path of an image as a diagram for the building is interesting. It’s different. I think we should encourage more of these types of projects in America.”
—juror Barbara Bestor, AIA

Columbia College Hollywood is a small film school nestled in Los Angeles’ Tarzana neighborhood, in south central San Fernando Valley. Many of the school’s facilities are located in the former headquarters of Panavision Cameras, which the school has been steadily outgrowing. So in a bid to make room and raise its profile in the film industry, it hired local firm Deegan Day Design to develop plans for a 15,000-square-foot building—connected to the existing facilities—that features a new Center for Contemporary Cinema. Appropriate for a school whose courses of study focus on getting a foothold in the film industry, Deegan Day drew its inspiration for the design from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s distinction between “looking” and “seeing.” The building is a steel-framed structure formed from two adjacent, semi-overlapping wedges that nod in form to both the cone of light that a film projector emits, and the resulting cone of light that reflects from the movie screen. The cones are connected, and form a single volume that holds all of the new programming. The center incorporates exhibition space, production facilities, classrooms, faculty offices, and a student café, and features six new spaces, with capacities ranging from 16 to 105, for film viewing and presentation. The college’s location near the city’s new Orange Line makes it easily accessible to visitors as well as students, opening the center to a broad audience. And it will be ready to welcome them soon—the project is expected to be completed in the second half of 2017.

Project Credits
Project: Media Center at Columbia College Hollywood, Los Angeles
Client: Columbia College Hollywood
Architect: Deegan Day Design, Los Angeles . Joe Day (principal); Taiyo Watanabe, Yo Oshima (project designers); Mark Lyons, Sonali Patel, Tanja Werner Associate AIA, Jose Thomas, Aaron Olko (design team)na Yessios
Executive Architect: Yu2e, Culver City, Calif. . Bill Tsui (principal)
Landscape Design Consultant: Groundswell Landscape Architecture
Photography: Taiyo Watanabe Architecture Photography; Bradley Wheeler
Size: 15,000 square feet
Cost: Withheld