The School of Film and Television (SFTV) is one of the fastest growing departments at Loyola Marymount University-with an expanding student enrollment, new faculty and staff hires, and recently added degree and certificate programs. To accommodate this growth, the university acquired 50,000 square feet of off-campus space in the nearby Playa Vista neighborhood. This new hub for SFTV, located at the heart of Los Angeles’ tech-savvy Silicon Beach community, seeks to create synergy between students, faculty, visitors, and industry leaders.

SOM’s design dedicates 35,000 square feet to the school’s graduate programs for screenwriting and production, with the remaining 15,000 square feet of space reserved for other LMU programs. The goal of the project is to bridge the gap between academia and real-world working environments for technology and media production. It supports a curriculum which gives students and faculty access to state-of-the-art media production equipment, 24-hour-a-day project production schedules, and flexible and adaptable spaces.

The space is envisioned as an organized network of learning environments: small and large, focused and collaborative, and most importantly, efficient and flexible. Given SFTV’s requirements for multi-use and informal gathering spaces that encourage collaboration, the physical environment acts as a backdrop for students to produce their projects that require a multitude of scenarios. The design balances learning, working, and communal spaces that foster thought, creative discourse, and experimentation.

SOM also assisted in developing a program that will allow for the phased movement of various departments into “swing spaces” that will facilitate LMU’s growth projections for SFTV in the years ahead.