#California College of the Arts

[melgillman]

I have some pretty big personal news to share: next week, I am moving to San Francisco to start a new job as department chair of the Comics BFA and MFA Programs at California College of the Arts!

I've been teaching at CCA since 2015, and it's been an absolute delight getting to work with the incredibly talented students and faculty there. I'm thrilled to get this chance to help lead this program I love very, very dearly.

San Franciscans -- I will see you very soon! And if you hear some weird noises from the docks, don't worry, that's just me

[tculvahouse]

Easter Egg Window

Twenty or twenty-five years ago—it’s hard to imagine how the time has flown—I had the opportunity to hide a sort of Easter egg in the main building of California College of the Arts in San Francisco. It’s not a masterwork of architecture, but it does show how one architect thought about a particular problem, so it may be illuminating. (For the non-architect, the most illuminating thing may be how much thinking can go into a very small decision.)

The building was originally built as Greyhound bus lines’ northern California repair shop. There was a great big enclosed space, the size of a football field, in which they fixed the buses, and along the long side of it were two stories of machine shops. As Lorne Buchman, president of CCA when the building was purchased, liked to say, it was the perfect building for a college of art and design. The big, open volume got subdivided into studio spaces, as did the upper, sky-lit floor of the two-story part, and the lower floor of that part became offices and classrooms.

It is a handsome building, thought to be Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s first in San Francisco. The drawings were signed by SOM partner Walter Netsch. The two-story part has continuous bands of steel-framed windows, which extend out from the wall a few inches, adding a layer to it. They look like this:

You’ll notice in the center of this image two window panels with thicker frames. These are the operable panels. They are what are known as “hoppers”: they’re hinged at the bottom and tilt inward to open. The architectural drawing convention for this kind of window looks like this; the point of the “V” is the hinge side:

In a renovation of one of the offices on this floor, a larger room was divided into two smaller ones, one of which—the one next to the entrance—ended up without an operable window:

David Meckel, who at that time was officially Dean of Architectural Studies and effectively Campus Architect, asked me to figure out how to modify that window so that it could open.

The most obvious solution would be to make one of the two lower panels operable, for example like this:

That, however, seemed a little boring, and it would have been the only instance where the operable window wasn’t part of a pair. Here’s what I ended up suggesting, instead:

How did I think about it?

First, I thought it should operate the way the other windows do, so it, too, is a hopper:

At the same time, I had observed that the operable panels of the original windows, taken together, are the same proportion as the pair of larger frames in which they sit, just shrunk:

. . . so I thought that could be echoed in the new window, as well:

That was the logical part.

In the process, though, a couple of amusing things occurred to me. The first is that another way to think about the operable frame in the new window is as if one of the existing frames had been slid over by half:

And, what’s really fun, when you open the window, you discover that the center vertical bar in the operable part (in the trade it’s called a muntin) is independent of the bar above. You don’t expect the two to break apart, but of course they do:

Significant? Not especially, but I like to think it’s an appropriate transformation for this building, because it heightens, just a little bit, the sense of layering that characterizes the original. That’s because, whenever you can think about a pattern in more than one way at a time, or can imagine a part of a pattern shifting or changing size, or when something that you think is part of one thing is actually (or also) part of another, each of those possibilities suggests a new layer.

And, whether or not anyone has noticed it in all these years, it remains available as a tiny lesson-prompt for the architecture students who walk by it every day.

[jacquelynstuber]

CCA(C) Oakland Campus

September, 2022

[animatedshortoftheday]

Brush: A Fox Tale (2018) [3 min] by Willi Anton and Faustina Arriola | USA

[doctorsiren]

every time I mention Ace Attorney around my (defense lawyer) father, he asks if I’ll be going to law school now

the best bit was me telling him that if I did that, I would be fulfilling the Phoenix Wright prophecy because I’d be dropping my art degree to pursue law

[archiveofaffinities]

Chris Burden, Untitled, Installation on Pomona College Campus, California, 1969

[dionysus-complex]

been thinking about Ohio lately

[venacoeurva]

Sometimes I feel a want to talk about my job and what I do outside of comm work, then the 90s-00s internet safety alarms that have been hammered in go off in my head and I decide you know what, even if I work for one of the biggest most popular retail places in America where it would be impossible to place or identify me via that, you still wouldn't get to learn that shit, so

[captain-waddles]

First Mabel doodle of 2024

[rooolt]

The post canon college gothcleats that lives in my head has haunted me for weeks and I have no way of inflicting it upon anyone else

[scoopisboopis]

yeah I consider myself somewhat of a photographer

[rookfern]

sometimes I like to dream about a world that does not immediately mark me as less intelligent for my accent

[captainfreelance1]

Here's Sarah Tuberty in Action on The Aerial Hoop.

[cozycreaturescorner]

y'all i'm finally applying to colleges after basically 4 years of procrastination! be very proud of me

[twiichii]

July is Wildfire Season

I hope you all are having a wonderful summer! Between working with Anise Health (as an APCC) and Upward Together (as a Teaching Artist), I have been underpaid, unfulfilled, etc. While the work is quite wonderful, I can’t help but struggle with the slow pace and honestly feel a bit hopeless and detached at times. Thus, I pursued two summer programs that can add to the holistic, fulfilling, and…

[nguyeningit]

Equivalent Exchange

Mother. 9″ x 12″ watercolor. If you’re a Full Metal Alchemist fan, I hope you dig this piece. I just finished a bunch of original art pieces for DCD COLLECTS. If you love original artwork, mystery boxes & manga/anime, give them a follow! Teaching at Los Angeles City College! I’ll be teaching the Draw Comic Book & Cartoon characters class at LACC! $75, 5 week course, every Sunday from…