Owner: Oregon College of Art and Craft

Completion Date: September 2010

Program: A two-story, 16,000-square-foot center for drawing, painting, and photography on the campus of the Oregon College of Art and Craft. The project consists of two steel-structure buildings connected by an overhang. The larger (southern) structure houses drawing and painting studios, a tool shop, a large classroom, a design studio, a photography studio, a digital lab, and a gallery. A small pavilion to the north consists of studios and a darkroom for students working on a thesis. The new building completes phase one of the college's expansion plans, which include a library and a metal shop also designed by Charles Rose Architects.

Design concept and solution: Inspired by the idea of a hillside town, the architects wanted to integrate the new building with its uphill neighbors, many of them simple wood constructions designed in the 1970s by the Pacific Northwest architect John Storrs. The Charles Rose team treated the hillside as a conceptual spine for the campus and added sets of stairs (along with ADA-compliant ramps and elevators) connecting the buildings along the hill. A new plaza just south of the project forms the base of the spine, and the future library will define the top. The architects clad the Jean Vollum building in western red cedar and oriented it to take advantage of the view of the mountains of the Coast Range. The project was originally planned as a single structure; breaking it in two and creating the thesis pavilion allowed the architects to open up the sloping landscape between the two sides for use as a garden or amphitheater. At the top of the main building, two large, geometric clerestory windows pop up out of the roof. With their expansive size, they double as sculptural forms and straddle the studios and hallways beneath, drawing northern light into the spaces below. For the interior finishes, the architects chose functional materials such as fiberboard wall panels for hanging artwork, pigmented concrete floors in the gallery, and linoleum floors in the studios.

Total construction cost: $4.55 million

Location: Portland, Oregon