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Education Archives - Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture

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Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture

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Pacific&#8217;s School of Engineering and Computer Science has always believed students learn best by doing. The Fletcher Jones Foundation Makerspace was designed around that conviction, a building that doesn&#8217;t just house the work, but puts it on display.
Before this project, student workspaces and fabrication facilities were spread across seven separate buildings on campus. Getting to equipment, coordinating with a classmate in another discipline, or simply building a shared sense of community, all of it was harder than it needed to be.
The renovation of Building 118 on Pacific&#8217;s South Campus brought those resources together under one roof. The building, a former community college facility with a well-preserved Art Deco facade, was worth keeping. The exterior was restored. The interior was rebuilt from scratch to support the way students actually work: iteratively, collaboratively, and across disciplines.

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C2007.00 Pacific Engr & Comp Science Maker Space-16

The central move of the design was to open the building up. Large glazing panels replace opaque wall sections along the main elevations, making the activity inside visible from the campus outside. At night, the lit interior glows against the South Campus like a lantern the work made legible, the building itself a signal that something is being made here. 
 
That transparency carries through the interior as well. Glass partitions between spaces maintain sightlines across the full floor plate. A student in the metal shop can see a peer debugging code twenty feet away. Cross-disciplinary awareness becomes a natural byproduct of simply showing up, the architecture does the work of connecting people that seven separate buildings never could.

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C2007.00 Pacific Engr & Comp Science Maker Space-15

The program is organized as a gradient from social to industrial. The Henry and Alice Hirata Welcome Lounge anchors the entry, a high-ceilinged, skylit gathering space with movable furniture that shifts easily from individual work sessions to full department reviews. The structure above is left exposed and painted white, giving the room an honest workshop quality rather than the polished feel of a conventional academic lobby. 
 
Further in, the Professor David Fletcher Resource Center provides a staffed hub for equipment and materials, flanked by digital fabrication areas with FDM and resin 3D printers, CNC machines, and computer workstations. Color and flooring shifts between zones give the open plan a clear spatial hierarchy without resorting to full enclosure. 
 
The machine shop occupies the most industrial end of the building, lit by a continuous skylight running its full length a deliberate choice that transforms a space that typically goes without natural light. Yellow translucent safety curtains at the machining stations provide the required separation while preserving the visual connectivity that defines the facility throughout.

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C2007.00 Pacific Engr & Comp Science Maker Space-1

The Fletcher Jones Foundation Makerspace is the realization of a simple but powerful idea, that bringing Pacific's dispersed engineering programs together under one roof would create something greater than the sum of its parts. What was once fragmented across seven buildings now occupies a single, purposefully designed environment where students from different disciplines share tools, space, and ideas every day. The building was designed to make that cross-disciplinary exchange not just possible, but inevitable

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The University Services Building at California State University, Chico is the new home for the Facilities Management &amp; Services (FMS). Located on the periphery of the campus, the building location optimizes functionality and flow within the existing facilities service yard. An open floor plan accommodates conference rooms, private offices, open workstations, work-room spaces, and other building support spaces.

The USB is the first mass timber building designed and built within the CSU system. The mass timber structure consists of glulam columns and beams, cross laminated timber (CLT) structural decking, and a lateral structure of steel brace frames. 
 
The mass timber structure provides multiple benefits for the building design and CSU campus. As the first of it’s kind at Chico State, the building is an educational tool for not only the FMS department, but also for students. Using mass timber reinforces the campus’ master plan goals of prioritizing sustainability and resiliency by using low carbon materials and systems. The use and expression of wood within the building interior also adds biophilic design benefits by connecting the building occupants more closely to nature.

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The design team worked closely with the campus and stakeholders to establish shared values and goals for the project which include maximizing interior daylight, maximizing structural and building systems efficiencies, minimizing environmental impacts, and designing for future flexibility. 
 
The use of mass timber is not the only design feature Programmatically, the floor plan layout locates building services and enclosed spaces such as conference rooms and offices in the core creating an open floor plate for flexible planning. The exterior design features large expanses of glass on the north and south elevations for maximizing daylight to shared spaces. The integration of exterior sun shade devices and CLT deck overhangs helps reduce direct sunlight and minimize solar heat gain. 
 
The project is designed to be all-electric, solar-ready, and achieve LEED Silver certification.

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B3017 CLARA Midtown, E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing

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The expansion of residential suburbs in the 1960&#8217;s and 1970&#8217;s left our central city with stately but underutilized school facilities. Fremont School is one of 10 examples in the area that was designed by Dean &amp; Dean. It is a beautiful brick and terracotta building in the Spanish Revival style on a quiet Midtown street. It had a second life as an adult education center, which was shuttered in 2012.
After much discussion and negotiation, Fremont School now is the new creative home for Sacramento’s performing arts community, complete with outdoor performance space. The high ceilings and large classrooms perfectly suit rehearsal and teaching needs for <a href="https://www.sacballet.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sacramento Ballet</a>, <a href="https://www.mckeeverdance.com/#index" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">McKeever School of Irish Dance</a>, <a href="https://sacprepmusic.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sacramento Preparatory Music Academy</a>, and several others.
There are many technical challenges to adapting an early 20th century non-reinforced masonry building to the needs of 21st century performing arts. For one, the west wing of the school needed a truly creative structural solution to make the former classrooms and hallways open up for ballet studios. With <a href="https://buehlerengineering.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Buehler Engineering</a>, an innovative solution of 36 post-tension cables made this need a reality. The red cables, typically buried within new concrete, are intentionally left visible and are viewable from the first floor School of the Sacramento Ballet studios. The structural system was more complex than other concepts but once optimized, it was the lightest and least costly solution for the budget.
On March 17, 2015, the Sacramento City Council approved spending to renovate the building for the performing arts community in Sacramento. On May 11, 2015, <a href="https://www.rsconstruction.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rudolph &amp; Sletten</a> started construction on the project. On March 9, 2016 the project &#8211; which was renamed <a href="https://www.claramidtown.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CLARA</a> &#8211; officially opened.
CLARA received the 2017 Rehabilitation Design Award from the California Preservation Foundation; and Honor Award from the AIA Central Valley as well as the Divine Detail Award for the innovative structural solution. In 2017, the project also received an Award of Excellence in Historic Preservation from SEAOCC.
Photos by Chip Allen; historic photos courtesy of Center for Sacramento History.

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PG&amp;E Gas Safety Academy, 2017

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A9007 Museum of Science and Curiosity, 2002-2021

The SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity (MOSAC) is a transformation project at the confluence of history, science, and community impact. Formerly the Powerhouse Science Center, MOSAC reimagines a long-dormant riverfront power station as a vibrant hub for science education, exploration, and civic engagement. Set against the banks of the Sacramento River, the museum is a cornerstone in the city’s riverfront revitalization and a destination for learning that connects past innovation with future discovery.

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The design of MOSAC grows directly from its context—physically and symbolically. Occupying the site of a once-abandoned PG&E power station, the museum forms a key part of Sacramento’s waterfront activation. It anchors the Robert T. Matsui Waterfront Park and serves as a southern gateway to the 32-mile American River Bike Trail, inviting cyclists, families, and visitors to engage with science through architecture and landscape.

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Vacant for over 50 years, the original 30,000-square-foot structure was carefully rehabilitated, including the construction of a new interior floor level. A striking two-story, 22,000-square-foot addition extends from the east, housing classrooms, a café, offices, and a light-filled lobby. A 120-seat planetarium punctuates the building’s mass, its zinc-clad hemispheric dome signaling the museum’s outward-looking mission. The facade is inscribed with angled vector lines—connecting the building to satellites, landmarks, and broader ideas—reminding visitors of our place within a vast, interconnected world.

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Museum of Science and Curiosity

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Originally designed in 1912 by noted architect Willis Polk in the Classical Revival style, the PG&E River Station B was formally closed in 1954 and lay dormant until MOSAC’s rebirth. Now listed on the National, California, and Sacramento Registers of Historic Places, the building is both a preserved landmark and a cutting-edge cultural destination. MOSAC is LEED Platinum certified, affirming its commitment not only to educational excellence, but also to environmental stewardship and sustainable design.

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Preservation Design Award—Rehabilitation

Vision Honor Awards—Building Healthy Places

Award of Merit—Rehabilitation, Renovation and/or Restoration

Best Project (Northern California)—Renovation/Restoration

Project Excellence Awards—Retrofit Metal Roof

Best Real Estate Projects—Adaptive Reuse

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B8003 OE3 Training Center, 2018

Operating Engineers Local 3 (OE3) is the largest construction trades union in the country, comprised of men and women who operate heavy equipment on job sites and roadways. The development of a comprehensive master plan lead to the design of a new 15-acre educational campus on a 1,500 acre site. Working in close collaboration with an environmental consultant, landscape architect, and civil engineer we ensured the new campus would be a good neighbor to the various wetlands, native species and plants surrounding the property. OE3 will utilize just 5% of the total site area for training at any one time and the campus core accounts for only 1% of the total land area.
The campus core is composed of seven structures arranged and inspired by the barns and outbuildings of rural farms. The main campus is surrounded by a loop road separating external heavy equipment and maintenance functions from internal pedestrian circulation of the campus core. The heart of the campus is comprised of administration, classrooms and training buildings arranged to create a centralized hyper-social outdoor space where large groups can gather, and decentralized quiet spaces where students and staff can unplug between classes. The arrangement also creates areas for natural habitat, stormwater retention with bio swales and ponds. Other areas dedicated to heavy equipment use and training include a maintenance shop, storage and two-acre covered dig area for training during inclement weather. Covered and open training areas are separated by a series of landscape features and vegetated mounds to help deflect equipment sounds from the instruction core of the campus
The buildings are simple structures appropriate in scale, proportion and form to the typology of the area. Similar to old barn structures which utilized a heavy timber kit-of-parts to construct frames, these buildings utilize pre-engineered frames offering an economy, simplicity and column free interior space for greater training flexibility.

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UC Santa Cruz Quarry Amphiteater

The Upper Quarry Amphitheater at UC Santa Cruz was designed in the mid-1960s by landscape architect Robert Royston inside of a natural stone quarry on campus. Graduations, protests, lectures and concerts were held in this 2,000 seat amphitheater until it deteriorated to the point it could no longer be safely used. Both a renovation and a rehabilitation, the project upgraded the venue to include accessible seating and better access for all patrons. The project scope also included rock-slope stabilization, safety fencing, improved emergency vehicle access, on-site stormwater treatment, regular and emergency power, and site lighting. Supporting the overwhelming request of the students, Wi-Fi was installed to serve over 2,000 simultaneous connections for streaming of live events.
The site now includes one additional row of seating, maintaining the original asymmetrical seat layout as closely as possible. Materials used represent the original design with revisions to improve long-term durability and maintenance. Stairs were also reconstructed in their original locations. The Upper Quarry Amphitheater is a historical resource under CEQA, and as such all modifications were sympathetic to the original design to not diminish the amphitheater’s historic integrity.
The project was featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine&#8217;s, January 2020 issue. It received a Special Mention from the jury of the 2020 Architizer A+Awards in the Architecture +Landscape category and was also chosen as a finalist in the Architecture +Preservation category.
Historic images are courtesy of University of California, Santa Cruz, Special Collections; Color photography by Kyle Jeffers.

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University of the Pacific, Fletcher Jones Foundation Makerspace

Chico State University Services Building

CLARA, E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts

PG&E Gas Safety Academy

Museum of Science and Curiosity

OE3 Training Center

UC Santa Cruz Upper Quarry Amphitheater Restoration

Sacramento State University Union Hornet’s Nest Renovation

Sacramento State Hornet Bookstore & Offices of University Enterprises, Inc.

Sacramento State Academic Information Resource Center

University of the Pacific, Chan Family Health Sciences Learning Center + Clinics Renovation

Sacramento State University Transportation and Parking Signage & Wayfinding Master Plan