Laguna College of Art and Design’s effort to bring its teaching programs together on Laguna Canyon Road has reached a visible construction milestone: the college placed the final steel beam atop its planned Innovation Center during a topping-out ceremony at its Big Bend campus. The consolidation plan was already moving forward by September 2025, when the Orange County Register described it as a plan five years in the making.
Big Bend is already home to LCAD’s BFA programs in Animation, Game Art, Graphic Design + Digital Media, and Illustration, according to the college. LCAD describes its broader Designing Futures initiative as an effort to unify its fragmented campus. The new center is intended to support that aim by bringing programs and shared facilities together.
A new building for a longer-term plan
The two-story building is planned to span 22,000 square feet, with classrooms, print labs, event and gallery space, and a cafe. The Los Angeles Times reported that city and campus leaders, students, faculty and contributors signed the final beam before it was lifted into place. The facility is to be named the Patrick Howe Quilter Innovation Center.
The project is backed by Patrick Quilter’s $40 million donation, the largest single gift in the college’s 65-year history, the Times reported. The contribution helped launch a broader $100 million capital campaign for campus modernization and the center. Quilter founded Quilter Sound Company in 1968; the Times reported that the company shifted from pursuing the guitar-amplifier market toward professional audio equipment.
LCAD says the center is intended to expand capacity and encourage collaboration across disciplines. The event account also reported that interim president and chief executive Mark Saville presented the facility as an investment in cross-disciplinary creative work. Those goals describe the college’s plans; the completed building’s eventual use and effect on collaboration remain to be seen.
A comparison, not a broader trend
One California comparison offers context without establishing a general trend: California College of the Arts said it unified its programs in San Francisco for fall 2022 and resumed full in-person learning there. That was a different approach from LCAD’s new purpose-built center in Laguna Beach, and a single example does not show how common such consolidation projects are.
Construction on LCAD’s center began in March 2026 after a fall 2025 groundbreaking, with BNBuilders overseeing the work, the Times reported. Its account gives an anticipated completion date of November 2027; the earlier Orange County Register report said the college planned to open the building in June 2027. The published forecasts differ, so the current completion schedule is not settled by those reports.
