The Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios at UCLA Offer a Lesson in Pragmatism and Creativity
The UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios, designed by Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee and Associates, is a world-class facility is dedicated to supporting emerging artists and strengthening Los Angeles’s position as a world arts capital. In July 2016, the School of the Arts and Architecture received a generous $20 million lead gift from alumna and renowned art dealer Margo Leavin in support of the project. And now, the major restoration and expansion creates a new building for the nation’s top-ranked public university to support its leading graduate program.
"Envision an institution dedicated to making art. It is not a museum, nor is it a gallery. These are the spaces where art meets a public or, more crassly, where art meets its market and is given value. Instead, think of a studio environment. Can that same environment also foster in pupils the canny balance between creativity and pragmatism required to break into the art world today?
The UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios have revitalized a 1948 warehouse building in Culver City, Los Angeles. Johnston Marklee, the architecture firm behind the adaptive-reuse project, unified the complex by using tilt-up concrete facade elements. Artist Catherine Opie offers a hopeful yes, pointing to the new art center at UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, where she has taught since 1992. (She was named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art this past December.) “Students are so incredibly vulnerable, and we live in a vulnerable time,” says Opie, whose work as a photographer often draws out the relationships between identity and place. They should feel that their studio building works for them, she adds.
For most of Opie’s tenure, nascent artists were housed off campus in a former wallpaper factory/warehouse in Culver City. Graduate art studios formed cramped warrens under wood bowstring trusses: hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Students complained about pigeons in the rafters.
That all changed last fall, when a cohort of 40 graduate art students moved into the retrofitted warehouse building—now expanded into the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios by the Los Angeles architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Principals Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee gutted the old warehouse and introduced new studio clusters inside. They then wrapped a thick layer of programmatic volumes—production, exhibition, and social spaces—around the perimeter of the existing structure to form a 48,000-square-foot campus. With an eye toward overall formal unity, they fashioned a pillowy concrete facade from tilt-up panels with a two-foot-wide custom formwork; it gently shields the budding artists from the outside world."— Mimi Zeigler, *Mar. 26, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Metropolis website.
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