Santa Fe Freight Depot

The Santa Fe Freight Depot is around four hundred meters long building in the industrial area east of downtown Los Angeles in the now so -called Arts District. The Southern California Institute of Architecture was the vacant building in 2000 to convert to the campus. This contributed to the revival of a district, which was considered a dirty corner of Downtown. The building is with a length of 1250 feet ( about 381 m ) longer than the Empire State Building is high. It was registered on 3 January 2006 the National Register of Historic Places.

Use as a goods station

The building built in 1907 and was designed by Harrison Albright, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and served as a goods station. The Santa Fe Coast Railway secured the property at the Los Angeles River and was about U.S. $ 300,000 (1907; adjusted for inflation 7,976,202 U.S. dollars ) in order to build the huge concrete building. The depot was intended to replace a cargo center, which was burned to the ground. Due to its size was the long, narrow reinforced concrete building into a local landmark. The building 120 has yokes that have an opening on both sides, whereby the discharge of goods wagons on the one hand and the loading trucks on the opposite side was possible.

Conversion to the campus of SCI - Arc

In the 1990s, the depot was no longer used. The building was covered all over with graffiti and the interior was removed down to the bare concrete, so that inside there was a single empty room with a length of approximately three football fields. In 2000, the Southern California Institute of Architecture closed shortly SCI - Arc, a lease for the property from and intended to relocate its campus here. In the next two years, SCI - Arc had renovated and converted the building from the industrial wasteland was a 5675 m² large university with state of the architecture. The plan for the renovation came from the SCI -Arc graduates and faculty member Gary Paige, of the building as a found object - described a high with six meter high ceilings and an extensive view of the skyline of Downtown. One critic noted that the time is liberally dealt [ with the building ], gave him a patina interior surface that resembles the character lines of a wise face. The problem lay in the typology: With a length as the Empire State Building is high, the shotgun Building was incessantly linear as only one cut the monotony interrupts its length by a quarter of a mile. Another critic wrote:

" The recombinant building is a lesson in engineering and architecture. Thirty thousand square feet of studios and seminar rooms, a workshop, Homework corners and a bridge to the library were layered, expansive and eager to create an open, permissive, flexible space. It seems that within these walls, anything can happen. Anyone who enters a studio through its input (which has no door ), at a location more like a stage, with a view through a proscenium, which is framed by new steel posts and beams that are parallel and in tandem with the old concrete columns and beams carriers. stand "

Before the opening of the SCI -Arc campus environment was at the Deport than run-down corner of Downtown. Completion and presence SCI - Arc has made ​​its contribution to the revitalization of neighborhoods. This will also involve an increase in the value of the building, creating a legal dispute was triggered, which ended in June 2005 with the decision that SCI - Arc has no right of first refusal on the building and the surrounding grounds. A contractor bought the unused land west of the area and gave in 2004 announced plans to build a pair of skyscrapers, each with forty levels, each with 384 luxury apartments.