The Academic Building was designed to house the college’s growing Cosmetology, Massage Therapy & Nursing Departments. Specifically, the goals of the building were to enable students to maximize self-help and reliance, creating a place to share resources, technology, and information and to develop a facility that is welcoming, inspiring, and exciting while being flexible and convertible, and allowing for 18-hour access for the students.
The design of this project seeks to integrate the new building with two existing buildings as well as with planned future buildings into a cohesive college center. An important component of the Workforce building was to bridge the aesthetic qualities of the existing three-story Angela Morales building and a new Learning Hub building on the campus. The project invokes similar design feature and materials from each of the buildings in a unique way. The programmatic organization of the building prioritizes the departments and classrooms with the highest volume of traffic to access the lowest levels of the building, and filtering less populated instructional spaces and secondary functions on the upper levels.