EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff UCLA Extension celebrated on Thursday, the opening of a new central facility. The facility is located at 1010 Westwood Blvd.

By Josh Wolf
Daily Bruin Contributor

The UCLA Extension program opened a new facility in Westwood on Thursday, creating a centralized location for its widespread teaching efforts.

The 48,000-square-foot facility at 1010 Westwood Blvd., aims to inspire creativity through its original design, said Dean of Continuing Education Robert Lapiner. The bright colors and textured plastics that adorn the walls symbolize many of the courses offered at that site through the Extension program, he added.

“We practice what we teach,” Lapiner said.

The goal of the new facility, the dean said, is to provide opportunity for interaction between academic departments.

“Bringing together our core programs in the arts and applied arts and design will strengthen them, and, we hope, further meaningful collaboration internally and with UCLA faculty and students,” Lapiner said.

The grand opening reception brought together administrators, architects, local government officials and teachers that had collaborated on the $1.5 million project.

“All of us at Extension are delighted to have been able to transform this venerable building into our newest classroom facility, bringing together programs that have led a nomadic existence until now,” Lapiner said at the ceremony.

After signing the lease in March 2000, UCLA Extension worked with architects and designers from Rios & Associates to create a modern learning environment.

“This is an extraordinary facility. It is all the things you would hope a learning environment could be,” Chancellor Albert Carnesale said in his speech at the event.

UCLA Extension, which also uses facilities at Universal City Walk, on the UCLA campus and at other locations throughout Los Angeles, offers 4,500 courses each year – 1,000 of which will be taught in the new facility.

The main classes – which had already been meeting at the facility since the beginning of fall – are architecture, interior design and landscape architecture, and visual and graphic design. The classrooms are available for all other subjects the program offers, said Extension spokesperson Julie Jaskol.

UCLA Extension teaches 65,000 students a year. Many of them hold advanced degrees, though classes are available to undergraduate students, Lapiner said.

Some of the students’ works – colorful designs, clay sculptures and landscape plans – were on display in 25 classrooms of the new facility on Thursday.

The projects displayed represented the product of high-level professional training, said Rosanne Sachson, a member of the “Friends of Extension” program.

The good thing about the new facility is that it offers a forum for the various disciplines to interact, whereas they were separate entities before, Sachson said.

“The idea is to open this up and take all the ideas that are coming from all of these creative programs and bring them together,” she said.