Student media organization the Daily Trojan ran a feature on the progress of Wallis Annenberg Hall, USC Annenberg's state-of-the-art facility opening Fall 2014.
According to the DT, workers have officially reached a halfway point in the construction process and are on schedule to finish the Hall by June 2014. Ground-level media facilities will open next July and the first classroom sessions will be held in August. Construction on the five-story building, which boasts a USC-first Collegiate Gothic architectural design, began last November.
"We are kind of the first and the benchmark of all future USC architecture, which is a really cool kind of blending of the past and providing something for part of the future,” Charles Peyton, director of operations for Annenberg Facilities and Technology and Chair of Annenberg’s Building Committee, told the DT. “It will be very Annenberg, very modern, very high tech, very different."
According to the article, inspiration for the Hall's interior came from the Arco Forum at the Kennedy School at Harvard, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and USC Annenberg's current facilities, which will continue to host classes and provide faculty space once the new building opens. A continuous atrium will connect all floors and a "three-story media wall driven by LED technology ... will act as a backdrop for the central space," the article read. “It’s going to be similar to the East Lobby with tables, chairs and a place for students to come hang out, be seen, study, kind of a watering hole," said Peyton.
The building, designed to showcase student work and encourage inter-school collaboration, will feature much more glass than drywall. "Students in classrooms will be visible, so that everyone can share a hardworking environment," the article read. Along with a converged multimedia newsroom, broadcasting facility and 360-degree assignment desk for all student media —Annenberg TV News, Annenberg Radio News and Neon Tommy — Wallis Annenberg Hall will have its own media storage and sharing system. “The entire building is anchored with one huge media storage system and a really robust media asset management and distribution system, which really means all students’ projects and formal multimedia work goes into a big bucket and that bucket is available for every student and faculty member to share, use, distribute as they want,” Peyton said. The Hall will also have its own media network with more than 111 different access points.
Read the full article here.
