Committed to supporting underrepresented and vulnerable students, CSU Long Beach’s Student Success Center’s new home creates safe spaces for students to find community and services they need to be successful. Sixteen programs will be co-located in CSU Long Beach’s new Student Success Center, collecting previously dispersed departments in one convenient place, where the planning and design support gathering and engagement.

The challenge was to make a welcoming, future focused place out of a 1950’s concrete building with dark and institutional corridors made of solid shear walls. A series of structural interventions not only reinforced the seismic resistance but allowed holes and transparency in these shear walls. Moving the circulation from a central double loaded corridor to the perimeter, so that the departments occupy the whole depth of the floor plate, allows people and activity to flow easily through the space. The light filled central stair creates an inviting entry.

With a new student lounge overlooking Friendship Walk, a major campus thoroughfare, and an active renovated courtyard, the new Student Success Center becomes a beacon for attracting students.