CENTER STAGE

SCI_Arc Graduation Pavilion, 2012

Los Angeles, CA

Every spring SCI-Arc selects a faculty member, along with students, to design a pavilion for their graduation ceremony. In 2011, Oyler Wu Collaborative designed a pavilion constructed of a steel frame along with 40,000 linear feet of rope that was knitted to create an intricate canopy. This year, Oyler Wu Collaborative was again asked to design the architecture for the ceremony but with the challenge of rethinking the event of the ceremony while keeping the existing pavilion they had previously designed. Essentially, the challenge called for making the existing pavilion new again. Their approach to the problem was two-fold. The first strategy considered the orientation and flow of the ceremony by reworking the movement of the graduating students, as well as changing the visual focus of the ceremony. They decided to re-orient the audience 180 degrees from the previous year, turning them from facing west toward downtown Los Angeles to facing east toward the quarter-mile long school building that SCI-Arc calls home. Secondly, with the audience now facing outward toward the open end of the existing pavilion, a new stage, entitled Centerstage, was designed to formalize the celebration of the diploma ceremony as well as the seating of the guest speakers. The main feature, the canopy of Centerstage, plays off of the repetitious structural elements of the existing pavilion, this time combining an ambitious steel cantilever with a color twisting shade fabric.