A new community college student center takes advantage, and not-so-subtly displays the versatility and sustainability, of structural steel.
Los Angeles Valley College’s Monarch Center appears light enough to take flight. Located in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, the new 41,000-sq.ft student center’s dramatic architectural form includes a soaring butterfly canopy and an elevated skybox that showcase the versatility, lightness and elegance of structural steel as a building material. The structural form of the modern $30 million building also plays a vital part in some of the building’s most important sustainability strategies. On track for LEED Silver certification, the building is designed in a U-shaped plan with a food court and cafeteria located in the center of the facility, a one-story bookstore wing to the east and the student activity center wing to the west. The courtyard in the middle is designed to be an active student events plaza and is protected from the occasional Southern California rain and more frequent harsh summer sun by a prominent 20,000-sq.-ft, sloping, steel-framed butterfly-form “solar umbrella” that towers 41 ft above finished grade at its highest point.
