As visibility and industry demand for creative and well-trained animators continues to expand, so too has the student interest in the Cleveland Institute of Art’s highly regarded animation program. The program's success has resulted in continuously increasing enrollment and the ambition to create a singular new home for the growing major.

In pursuit of a new identity for the program and without a surplus of unallocated space for expansion, J. KURTZ was asked to reimagine an existing amalgam of underperforming spaces lodged in the center of the existing historic 1915 McCullough building. The objective was not simply to accommodate the growing need for more equipped educational space but to provide a center of gravity and home for a program where students spend uninterrupted hours and days in the creative struggle of their field.

We take a subtractive approach to the renovation; removing unnecessary barriers, underperforming infrastructure, and underused rooms while stripping the architecture back to the elemental bones of the original building. Considering the backdrop as a neutral canvas for the creative output of the program, meant that we could maintain a simplicity in our interventions. Inserting a series of discrete volumes to accommodate offices, crit space, work space, and a ‘working lounge’ area; we defined core functions volumetrically while sharing interstitial space and embedding a new home base in the Institute for a program that was previously dispersed.

The animation studios at the core of our work triggered a chain reaction of seven interventions across the four floors of the former Ford assembly plant to reorganize existing programs and adjacencies resulting in a 14,000 SF renovation + re-use project consisting of new Game Design Studios, dedicated and open digital labs, offices, critique spaces and a relocated Human Resources suite into an underutilized storage space beneath Henry Ford’s former offices.

Spatially, the project is a series of horizontal datums which are dimensioned to minimize visual distraction and colored to enhance visibility of the work and dampen other noise in the visual field. White table tops with a deep grey band of exposed block as backdrop to the machines, surmounted by a continuous pin-up surface that can take on the frenetic life of the creatives that will come and go, but will ultimately call this space home for weeks on end.

Animation Studios

#Discovery (3 files)

#Detail (1 files)

#Construction (4 files)

#Occupancy (6 files)