Cal State Long Beach Completes Pair of Projects

By Eric Althoff

LONG BEACH, Calif.—General contractor Clark Construction has finished a pair of educational projects at the Cal State Long Beach campus, located in Southern California about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

One effort was to expand the college’s art institute, which was formerly known as the University Art Museum but will be known hereafter as the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum. According to a recent release from Clark, the expansion doubles the museum’s total exhibition space to 4,000 square feet. The addition features a 15-foot, diamond-shaped glass vestibule at the redesigned museum entrance.

In total, the museum is now 11,000 square feet in area, and offers modern education facilities, galleries with moveable walls, outdoor gardens and storage facilities. Solar panels and sustainable construction materials used throughout were intended to help the museum win LEED Silver certification.

The reimagined museum is scheduled to open this month to visitors.

Clark’s other project at CSULB entailed renovating the Horn Center, which used to be a computer lab and student advising facility and morphing it into state-of-the-art classrooms and lecture halls. The Horn Center is now one of the largest computer labs across the entire CSU system.

Both the Horn Center and Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum were completed on the requisite 17-month schedule. The jobs represent some 100,000 hours of labor for local craftspeople.

Pfeiffer Partner Architects reportedly led the design for the projects.