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AMDA
COLLEGE OF
PERFORMING ARTS
Hollywood, CA
Client: Clarett West Development
The west coast campus of AMDA (American Musical and Dramatic Academy) sought to expand its Hollywood campus. In a competition with OMA, the team proposed an intricately expansive, vertical program that expanded the Conservatory’s open space by 2.2 acres while bringing housing and new academic programming to a constrained urban footprint. RELM’s landscape was inspired by juxtaposition of the undulating topography of Santa Monica Mountains and the flatness of the LA basin and how to maximize site lines and connections at all datums.
HOLLYWOOD FORECOURT, REIMAGINED
Beginning at the street, visitors, students, and faculty are welcomed with attractive, linear plantings. Landscape offers a sense of institutional identity and street presence while ensuring the campus remain fully secure. Once inside, the planted screening element spills onto AMDA’s piazza—reminiscent of historic Hollywood theatre forecourts—which can be adapted for performances and awards galas alike. AMDA’s café, servicing 1400 users, also spills out onto the open space. The piazza is the conservatory’s central gathering space, hosting the most public of uses that foster student life.
STACKING SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPES
As users ascend the new vertical campus, plantings will evolve from the valley floor palette to a semidesert chaparral landscape, reinforcing AMDA’s connection to Los Angeles’ native ecology. Natural systems will shade, cool, and treat sheet flow as well as attract pollinators and increase biodiversity. In the end, RELM’s open space design reinforces AMDA’s mission of ‘serving as both school and stage.’ It provides flexible outdoor education opportunities and a gorgeous backdrop for creative enterprise.
