Art in action: a famed Californian design school remodels industrial buildings to engage the public.

Pasadena, once shrugged off as the home of little old ladies in tennis shoes, can fairly claim to be the most interesting component of the LA metropolis. The California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) is advancing the frontiers of science, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is exploring the universe, Norton Simon is the most civilised of art museums, and there's a scatter of innovative houses. To these assets add Art Center College of Design, which, under the leadership of former MOCA director Richard Koshalek, is branching out from the sleek black box on its sequestered hillside campus.

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Phase one of the new South Campus, which will engage the public and take education beyond the classroom, was inaugurated last spring with the first Art Center Design Conference. It's located on a four-acre site at the north end of the Arroyo Seco freeway, America's first, which leads from downtown LA. This is not the genteel Pasadena of tree-lined streets, Arts and Crafts, and the Rose Parade, but a gritty industrial zone that might easily have been levelled and turned into a bland office park. Instead, the city offered Art Center a decommissioned power station, which Frank Gehry will soon turn into a graduate centre, in the same rough-edged way that he created MOCA's much-admired Geffen Contemporary from a former police garage more than 20 years ago.

Daly Genik Architects have recently completed the first block of the campus by transforming the Wind Tunnel, a huge concrete box that was built in 1942 by a consortium of aircraft manufacturers to test the latest aerodynamic designs, and shut down in the 1960s. Few knew it was there, but now this heroic monument to the Machine Age--conveniently located beside a Metro station--will serve over 5000 part-time students, of every age, day and night, as well as the graduate art programme.

'The challenge was to analyze and uncover what was here, water-blasting concrete, stripping clutter, and adding paint and natural light to the interior,' says Kevin Daly. 'Also to make sense of circulation since there will be lots of first-time visitors.' Following a seismic retrofit, windows were carved into the concrete street facade to reveal the activities within and shed a welcoming glow onto the pavement at night. Tilted steel containers in the entry courtyard serve as welding shops. A printing studio occupies a storefront opening onto a ground-floor concourse. Filtered skylights have been set into the bow-truss roof over the soaring space that housed the blowers, and this is now used for exhibitions as well as conferences. The offices and mechanical rooms that were wrapped around three sides of this great void have been turned into workshops, classrooms, and skylit studios--a luminous labyrinth of interlocking spaces that open up to common areas and terraces. Daly Genik have put every corner to use and preserved the raw industrial character of the building, while averting any sense of claustrophobia.

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A flying steel staircase supported on tilted poles projects from the south end, linking four levels to the roof garden that Nancy Goslee Power has landscaped with drought-resistant grasses. They embrace three angular lanterns that pull light into the heart of the building and, at night, seem to float above it like illuminated marquees. Three layers of Foiltec polycarbonate--a tough, transparent plastic film used for the Eden Project--enclose pockets of air, and sensors cause these to expand or contract in response to sunlight, thus regulating the level of light or heat below. Bruce Mau devised a curvilinear pattern that is printed onto two of the layers, and also designed the perforated metal signage.

Gutsy and green, this new facility changes the image of Art Center and Pasadena. Two years from now, when Daly Genik's new dormitory block on the neighbouring site has been completed, and the power station has been remodelled, this should be one of the most exciting and accessible schools in LA. Already it has spurred a plan to landscape Arroyo Seco Parkway--once part of Route 66--as a front drive to the city historic core, and prompted the mayor to convene a conference to explore ways of bringing better architecture to a city that has lapsed into timidity. Other institutions may move to the area, and Koshalek is establishing links with institutions in Tokyo and Barcelona to strengthen the international reach of the school.

Meanwhile, changes are under way at the verdant hillside campus. Hodgetts + Fung contributed an outdoor student centre (AR May 2001), Gehry is to build a spiral library, and an architect will soon be chosen to design a technical skills and materials laboratory beside the signature black box that Craig Ellwood's associates completed in 1976. No longer will Art Center be celebrated only as the school of choice for aspiring car designers--an ivory tower for stylists. Taken together, the two campuses restore the original emphasis on experimentation, and broaden it.

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