After 10 years of construction and multiple delays, the Valley Academic and Cultural Center (VACC) at Los Angeles Valley College was finally completed and a ribbon cutting ceremony was held late April.
However, students will have to wait a bit longer to use its many specialized rooms as the facility opens in the fall semester.
During the ribbon cutting, LA Community College District (LACCD) Chancellor Alberto J. Roman called the VACC “a promise that has been fulfilled; a promise that we made to invest in this beautiful community that deserves access to higher education and opportunities.”
The new 103,000-square-foot facility is impressive.
It’s packed with amenities that bring together media arts and performing arts programs under one building. The VACC will host not one, not two, but four different theaters. The biggest one will have 450 seats and multiple balcony levels; the second is a 250-seat Screening Theater, followed by a 200-foot Horseshoe Theater and 90-seat Lab Theater.
But the facility will also feature plenty of technical spaces, including smart classrooms, a digital film studio, motion capture room, photography studio, graphics labs, sound editing rooms, a radio station, newsroom, a dance rehearsal studio and a Foley room – a place to record ambient sounds like footsteps or broken glass that are later added to film, video and other media.
The building was designed by Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney (EYRC) Architects, an architecture firm, while the construction was overseen by QDG Architecture. Mathew Chaney, a partner at EYRC, said that each aspect of VACC is meant to teach students the “entire arc” of performing arts and media arts.
On one side, students will learn about set design, construction, rehearsals and how to hold a production. On the other side, they’ll learn about writing, editing and the technical aspects of making a production.
“The hope is for those creatives to be interacting with each other, mingling chance encounters, and really fostering greater creativity among all of them,” Chaney said. “It’s kind of a visionary program to bring these two [departments] together in a building of this level of technical capability.”
Patricia Rhee, another partner at EYRC Architects, said design work on the building began back in 2004, remarking it’s the longest project she’s ever worked on. She said that it was originally going to be just a media arts center, but the college later decided to incorporate the performing arts into the facility as well.
“Any one of these large performing spaces could be a building in and of itself, and to have [several] performing spaces all together in one complex, what we wanted to do was have wayfinding be very straightforward and simple, so that was [the source of] this idea of this linear lobby that extends from one end of the building to the other,” Rhee said.
“Because there were different departments that had to fit together into this tightly bound puzzle, but organizing it in this way that made sense for … the collaboration space threaded through that, was what drove our layout of the design,” she added.
The project endured numerous delays. The center was originally planned to be completed in just two years, but the project kept facing several issues that forced the deadline back; poor planning and heavy rainfall contributed to the delays.
“I’m hoping that, [despite] it taking a long time, that it’s worth the wait and that it really gets used not only by the students and faculty, but by the community because it’s really a gem,” Rhee said. “It’s a resource that should be shared … hopefully by everybody.”