West Valley College’s Visual Arts Building transforms a quiet quadrant of the campus into a vibrant hub for art students and the greater college community. Located on a heavily wooded sloped site, the 20,000 square foot building is carefully threaded among existing oak and redwood trees, allowing the natural landscape setting to permeate the interior studio spaces. The generously glazed curtainwalls and louvred canopies bring greater visibility to the arts while offering generous covered outdoor working areas.
The hilly site made possible a double-height gallery and a flexible studio at the lower level, which serves as an extension of the gallery and a collaborative project space. The gallery weaves seamlessly with the campus circulation, allowing passersby to connect directly with the art on display. Five day-lit art studios wrap around a central courtyard anchored by a heritage oak tree and are connected with direct access to covered outdoor spaces for expanded use. The integrated layout of the metal/woodworking shop and kiln/foundry area further enhances the studio curriculum. The exterior plaza encourages cross-pollination of disciplines and stimulates creative exchange.
Bio Mark Cavagnero Associates is a San Francisco-based architecture firm built on a foundation of serving civic, cultural and institutional clients. We approach each project with a focus on the immediate and greater community it will serve. The firm has completed a wide range of architectural and master planning projects based on this ideal, including large and small scale institutional, non-profit, and commercial projects. The firm provides a full range of services, from programming, master planning, site planning and conceptual design, through construction documents and administration.
Other prizes In addition to being well-received by users and the community, our work has garnered more than 100 design awards from local, state, national and international organizations. Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects was honored with the AIA California Council’s 2012 Firm of the Year Award, the highest honor that the organization bestows upon a firm, recognizing distinguished architecture and a culture of mentoring the next generation of architects. The firm ranks in Architect magazine’s 2015 The Architect 50, the ranking of the top 50 architectural firms in the country. Mark Cavagnero was personally honored with the AIA California Council’s 2015 Maybeck Award, a lifetime achievement award often referred to as the “Gold Medal of California.” In every project we design we strive for logic, strength, functional excellence, clarity, sustainability, economical use of materials, and, of course, beauty. Ultimately, the challenge of our work is to build something that authentically represents our core values and innate beliefs: fairness, stability, strength, and openness.
