The deconstruction of an abandoned industrial arts building establishes a series of fluid spaces and dynamic surfaces that support the program of an East Oakland public high school.

The project reused an old and long-abandoned industrial arts building at the edge of the campus. Whether industrial or fine, arts are about making things, and the building celebrates this spirit of anticipation, of the unfinished, of evolving creative and productive energy. The design vocabulary emphasizes building as backdrop, students and their work as foreground. The resulting school is more fragments of walls than rooms, more patches of sunlight than institutionalized enclosures, more ambiguities of interiority than the explicitness of inside and out.