San Francisco State To Get a $146 Million Performing Arts Center
Stark white against the mercurial skies of San Francisco, the Mashouf Performing Arts Center will be a dramatic addition to the San Francisco State University campus. The contemporary building will house five performance spaces, including a 1,200-seat opera theater for large performances, and dozens of studios and classrooms for music, theater, dance and broadcast journalism. It was designed by Los Angeles’ Michael Maltzan Architecture, which is best known for projects as diverse as UCLA’s Hammer Museum and Skid Row Housing Trust’s New Carver Apartments.
“This building is meant to be a gateway, both physically and culturally,” says Maltzan, who hopes the center will create connections among students, faculty and the community, as well as the arts themselves. “It’s not about being isolated anymore. The center was designed so that students of different disciplines could collaborate and cross-pollinate to generate a more dynamic, creativity on campus,” says project director Peter Erni.
Situated on an awkward triangular lot at the southwestern corner of the university grounds, the 242,000-square-foot facility will be dominated by a box housing the opera theater and a long wavelike entry ramp lined with floor-to-ceiling glass.
The Mashouf Performing Arts Center will cost a whopping $146 million, all of which is being funded by state bonds and private donations. The building’s namesake, Manny Mashouf, founder of the women’s clothing brand Bebe (and an SFSU alum), donated $10 million to the university in 2005 for a new performing arts center. Construction is planned in three phases over nine years, and is set to begin in 2013.
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A new arts center when students can't even afford tuition! Brilliant! Bravo!
I'm sure the students who are paying rising public CA State school fees are ecstatic!!
It's privately funded, so it has nothing to do with tuition.
Is not PRIVATELY FUNDED !!!!
Larger classes, higher fees, lay off faculty. Defer badly needed maintenance on existing buildings. The list goes on. Who's in charge here, anyway?
Does it occur to any of the critics here that maybe the people in the arts program are, in fact, ecstatic? If it were a gym or a sports field, would you all complain? It's also important to note that if it is paid for with bonds, then the bonds were most likely voted for, and the spending approved, prior to layoffs and tuition hikes. Bonds take a while to enact and once approved, funding allocation and stipulations can't change.
If these successful alums really wanted to contribute and give back, they could help renovate existing facilities and take some of the burden off the current students whose fees are getting hiked each semester, even as services are getting cut. And who is "privately funding" this? Mashouf, the namesake, is paying less than 10% of the cost of the building, which will likely escalate. A huge amount of the funds are coming from the state, from a part of the budget that is supposedly separate from the area of the budget that covers classes, but I do not buy for a second that this money couldn't be better appropriated to improve existing structures or help soften the blow of budget cuts and fee hikes on students. Even if the cost of the building IS being covered by funds that could not go towards anything other than this new building (which I doubt), the CSU system is still going to be stuck with the cost of maintaining an additional building. All while we have an unfinished library building on campus, a building that should have been condemned after the last major earthquake (HSS), and professors are being laid off left and right or are jumping ship to go work for universities who can offer reasonable job security. If something in the CSU system doesn't change, and fast, the University won't have students who can afford to attend or professors left to teach in their new "privately funded" building.