Glass Reels: Media Production Center, Columbia College

Added : 17 Aug 2010 | Visits : 2102 | Average votes : %

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Embedded amidst Columbia College Chicago, the Media Production Center materialising from glass, by Chicago-based architectural firm Studio Gang Architects, is a reflection of the courses it offers.

The 2010 Master Plan for the Columbia College Chicago extended to integrate the Media Production Centre designed by Studio Gang Architects as one its three new buildings. Tailored to the client’s aspirations, the glass building was derived as a teaching tool. Although it is difficult to capture its ideology in a single illustration, the architects processed a cinematic quality to arrive at the final concept. The clients brief required the college identity to translate through its design elements and as a teaching tool. The campus design revolved around an area of 36,000sqft, stretched to comprise of three large sound stages for film, video and motion capture instruction as well as teaching space for lighting, set-making, directing and animation classes.

The outer glass façade of the building was an experimental shell that mirrored the colour bar test pattern used in the film industry. The overall colour panels encouraged budgetary monitoring while inducing more structure in the pattern at the same time through their horizontality. The glass shell allows a transparency that connects the urban surroundings to the structure’s interiors visually. The light that streams in through the coloured prisms is used as a key facet to guide movement in the interior. The play of light manipulates the perspectives to enhance surreal quality to the spatial matrix. The visual clarity emerges as a continuous flow where all the typical backstage aspects of film-making are brought to the forefront by the introduction of huge glass panes between studios. Such an exposure of activities creates an emergent interaction between the users and the building’s language. The whole environ culminates into a collaborative approach as the architects have evolved intricate innovations like provision of large sound stages where classes can be held collectively. Aligning various programmatic and contextual principles, the site responds to the inherent problems. The walls, floors and roof are technically sound to overcome the vibrations activated by the nearby elevated trains. Moreover, the details were perfected to provide flat floors for rolling cameras, low velocity air for quietness during filming, and durable surfaces for mobility of large carts and lights into spaces. Imbibing sustainability as its feature, the building achieves LEED gold certification owing to the innovative technologies inculcated for reducing energy use including its air supply system for the sound stages.

The variance of spatial layering and compositional arraignment of translucent colour panels in the entirety of a glass structure renders a drama that is rare in campus designs.