By Vicki Bolam, review@ucsc.edu
UCSC's new Digital Arts Research Center was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the same architectural firm that created Pixar Animation Studios. The three-story, 26,000-square-foot building opened this fall. Both facilities are intended to promote creativity, collaboration, and community.
The Digital Arts Research Center is located at a key campus crossroads and serves as a new social and intellectual hub for UCSC's vibrant performing and visual arts complex. As with the Pixar facility, the Digital Arts Research Center includes central spaces that maximize the kinds of serendipitous encounters that nourish creative communities.
The Digital Arts Research Center provides a new home for UCSC's multidisciplinary Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) M.F.A. program, as well as expanded space for the Arts Division. And although it has "Arts" in the title, the Digital Arts Research Center actually serves the entire campus--DANM draws its faculty and students not only from the arts, but also from engineering, mathematics, biology, anthropology, and many other disciplines.
