High School for the Visual & Performing Arts

Los Angeles Unified School District new flagship high school, with emphasis in the Visual and Performing Arts, is loca ted across the Hollywood Freeway from th e Cathedral Our Lady of Angels and in direct vicinity of Disney Concert Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Grand Avenue, currently under redevelopment by Gehry Partners. The school 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. By breaking up the student body into four so-called “academies,” each specializing in one of the arts, a closer and more personal environment between teachers and students is created. Each academy occupies a distinct building which houses the art studios next to general classrooms, administration spaces and teachers workrooms.
Architect: Coophimmelb (L) Au