Hasley Hall

College of the Canyons, Valencia, CA

The Hasley Hall building at the Valencia campus of College of the Canyons added 30,000 ASF of computer labs, five general classrooms, a 120-seat movie theater, the College’s Board of Trustee’s conference room/suite, and 30 top-floor faculty offices.

The overall structure forms a two-winged building connected by a cast-in-place concrete/steel/glass truncated cone-shaped tower, which acts as the circulation core. This three-story building was planned to fill an under-utilized space identified in the Master Plan between the existing Student Center and Physical Education buildings.

Integrating Hasley Hall into this sloped site created a three-story structure accessible from grade at each level. The top floor is connected to the existing Student Center by a suspended walkway leading to the Main Entry. The computers labs located on the second floor are distributed throughout the central circulation core and have their secondary exits at grade. The movie theater and the Board of Trustee’s conference room/suite located on the first floor are adjacent to a private courtyard which creates a well-needed students and faculty gathering spaces. The building’s shape and placement on the site (nested between two existing buildings with different elevations) create a variety of small and large active and passive exterior spaces. The central core responds as a three-story Atrium and contains niches of off-circulation space that serve as study areas with data and power ports for lap-top computers. The Atrium’s large glass walls bring in abundant natural light and provide both a feeling of openness as well as views of landscaped terraces, exterior plazas and floors above and below. The Building’s transparency is achieved through the use of the articulated glass curtain walls as the primary exterior material, the weightlessness and mirror quality of the colored spandrel glazing contrasts effectively with the heavy solid concrete of the adjacent buildings. The cast-in-place concrete with a ship-lap pattern was selected to reinforce the articulation between the central core and the two-winged building, a choice that also responds to the physical challenge of the sloped site. Reference: https://www.kbzarch.com/college-of-the-canyons-hasley-hall