Pomona College To Build New Art Center
Pomona College is planning to begin groundbreaking for a new studio art center in October 2012, with completion set for mid-2014. To fund this project, Pomona has received a $100,000 gift from the Hearst Foundation, announced recently on Pomona College’s website. The rest of the article from pomona.edu is printed below:
Pomona College was awarded $100,000 by The Hearst Foundations to be used toward the construction of the new Studio Art Center. The groundbreaking for the new facility will be in October 2012 and the anticipated completion will be March 2014.
The Studio Art Center will replace the outdated 100-year-old Rembrandt Hall. The new facility—to be located north of Seaver Theatre near the Wash, where it will eventually be at the heart of the College’s new Art District—will offer approximately 36,000 square feet of space for teaching and creating art, more than double the space currently available for the studio arts. The center will have new studios for painting, drawing, sculpture, digital arts and photography. In addition, it will house a shared fabrication laboratory, a shared 3-D printing facility and a computer laboratory with digital output facilities, two classrooms, a faculty and student lounge and a gallery. The College contracted with wHY Architecture, a renowned architectural collaborative workshop based in Culver City.
The College has set a minimum goal of building to LEED Gold standards to ensure that the highest standards of sustainability and energy efficiency are met. The palette of materials used in the Studio Art Center resonates with that used in other Pomona buildings, but the new building will reverse the solid-to-glass ratio of older buildings, aiming for a 20% solid, 80% glass distribution that makes the best possible use of natural light.
The Hearst Foundations are national philanthropic resources for organizations and institutions working in the fields of education, health, culture and social services. Their goal is to ensure that people of all backgrounds have the opportunity to build healthy, productive and inspiring lives. The charitable goals of the Foundations reflect the philanthropic interests of William Randolph Hearst. The Hearst Foundation, Inc. was founded in 1945 by publisher/philanthropist William Randolph Hearst. In 1948, Mr. Hearst established the California Charities Foundation, renamed the William Randolph Hearst Foundation in 1951. Both Foundations are national private philanthropies operating independently from The Hearst Corporation.
Jacky Yao, author/editor of the Claremontian can be reached at jacky@claremontian.com.