Put Gehry Building on Hold, Say Alumni and Students at Art Center College of Design

The Los Angeles Times reports that students and alumni at the Art Center College of Design are pushing the college to suspend plans for a $50-million building by Frank Gehry and put more money into scholarships and instruction.

The college, which has top designers among its alumni, has been expanding in recent years, opening a satellite campus and engaging the design community with swanky conferences. But alumni are concerned that the college will overextend itself and that its reputation will suffer. Some already see a decline, according to the Times.

“Paul Kirley, a project designer for Stuart Karten Design, a Los Angeles industrial design company, said he regularly evaluates prospective new hires — and that his firm, which has many Art Center alumni like himself, is now looking more often to competing schools such as the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Kirley, who graduated in 1991, said he found nobody he wanted to hire about eight months ago after interviewing 14 prospects at Art Center (eventually, he said, the firm did find one well-qualified new Art Center graduate who filled the spot). Over the last five or six years, he said, ‘I’m not seeing the consistency that used to be there.’”

But the college has its advocates for the Gehry building and the expansions — particularly in Richard Koshalek, president of the college, according to the article. “Koshalek said Monday that the chance to work with cutting-edge technology in Gehry’s Design Research Center would be an educational boon for students. And in a global economy, he said, building a network of corporate and international contacts for Art Center will pay off in opportunities for its graduates. … Art Center administrators say that the Gehry building — which won’t be built until fundraising permits — is not the problem, but a key solution to work space crowding.”