FIDM San Diego, San Diego, United States

Clive Wilkinson Architects completes new campus for FIDM

The latest installment of FIDM’s unique creative learning environments, the San Diego Campus, is a dynamic 'learning landscape'. Together with sister campuses in Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the new architecture has come to represent the college’s reputation, brand, and philosophy towards education.

A variegated internal landscape is organised around the complex programmatic requirements of a school campus, all the while framing remarkable views of San Diego’s skyline and an adjacent park. FIDM’s new learning landscape is organised in three parts: a public entry zone, an educational zone and a zone for student support services and administration. A continuous path connects the different areas of the campus, taking one through specific areas such as reception, admissions, career guidance, financial services, classrooms, labs, student lounge and the library, each with its own unique spatial experience.

The warm palette of oranges, yellows and greens seen in the in the local desert vegetation compliment the rich blues of the clear desert sky. These saturated colours differentiate the 'monuments' in the landscape from the warm muted background characterised by the large oak-paneled ceiling and sand coloured quartz flooring in the public zone. The full-height wall graphics of abstracted vegetation lend visual texture to the space. Providing an environment for student socialisation, the Student Lounge offers a location for informal meeting to occur under a canopy of organic metal lanterns.

Creative Media Centre - City University of Hong Kong

Leigh & Orange and Studio Daniel Libeskind complete futuristic new Media Centre in Hong Kong

The Creative Media Centre for the City University of Hong Kong provides facilities that make the University to the first in Asia to offer the highest level of education and training in the creative media fields. The Centre will house the Centre for Media Technology and the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology. The distinctive crystalline design creates an extraordinary range of spaces rich in form, light, and material that, together, create an inspiring environment for research and creativity.

Studio Daniel Libeskind worked with Leigh & Orange Limited to complete the project on November 15th 2010. The project brief for the Creative Media Centre expressed two distinct requirements. First that there are very few repetitive rooms in the building and most rooms needed specific technological requirements that determine size, proportion, lighting, sound isolation and even structure and mechanical systems. In addition, there were requirements for space efficiency and cost that matched any other public academic building in Hong Kong.

The brief also required that the design of the CMC encourage creativity, collaboration and be a bold and provocative environment for the natural chaos inherent in creative endeavour. The architects balanced these two requirements through the connective public spaces on the interior and exterior that flow around the private, technical academic rooms. A line of cores runs through the center of the building. One-way beams span to the perimeter and create a 3m planning module for the rooms. Open area for circulation follows the line of cores but becomes an important space for creative collaboration through specific sculptural treatments. The sloping walls of the building create larger public spaces on the lower floors and open exterior areas on the ground.

Finally, within the private academic areas, the architects developed teaching clusters that reflect the same balance of openness and efficiency as the building as a whole. Each cluster has rooms for experimentation in their centre, offices and studios around the perimeter and flexible space for cooperation in between. These areas are asymmetrical and typically too wide for a corridor yet narrower than rooms, they are thus distinct areas specifically designed for unpredictable collaboration between teachers and students - between production and theory. The distinctive crystalline design creates an extraordinary range of spaces rich in form, light, and material that, together, create an inspiring environment for research and creativity.

Arts and Innovation Centre, Bangor University, United Kingdom - From the dragon's den..

Work on unifying Arts and Innovation Centre at Bangor University begins onsite

Due to open in spring 2013, the Arts and Innovation Centre at Bangor University - also known as the Pontio project - has been designed by global architecture firm Grimshaw to showcase local and international artistic talents using state-of-the-art digital technology.Construction has now commenced on the project, which was recently afforded financial backing of £27.5m from the EU's Convergence European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Assembly Government.

The scheme also includes the erection of an 'Innovation Hub', designed to generate strong professional relationships between the educational institution and local businesses. The new design structure will straddle an area between the lower and elevated parts of Bangor city centre, unifying the two main campus areas of upper and lower Bangor.

Over a construction period of two years, Bangor University is hoping to incorporate a 500+ seat theatre, a rehearsal studio, teaching rooms, a cinema and an outdoor amphitheatre, alongside social spaces such as a new Student Union, bars, cafes and restaurants.