LONG BEACH, Calif.—Ground has broken at Cal State Long Beach for the new La Playa Residence Hall, a 108,000-square-foot student housing project from designer Perkins&Will and constructed by Swinerton. The $115 million project encompasses three five-story buildings surrounded by outdoor amenities such as dining commons, a welcome plaza and a shared lawn.  La Playa represents just one piece of the State of California’s Higher Education Student Housing Grant Program to increase the number of below-rate rental options for on-campus student housing.

Being built by Swinerton at the Hillside Housing village, La Playa Residence Hall will contain 424 beds in various dorm room configurations in single- and double-occupancy student rooms as well as faculty accommodations. The ground floor will offer a kitchen, and every floor will also include study areas and lounges. La Playa will also host a 2,000-square-foot multipurpose room and music practice rooms as well as additional offices for the school’s Counseling and Psychological Services program.

“We expanded on the village feel of the surrounding Hillside Housing community by dividing the project into three structures connected by bridges,” said Yan Krymsky, principal and design director at Perkins&Will’s Los Angeles studio. “This gives the project a more approachable scale and preserves open space on campus.”

David Damon, principal and global higher education practice leader at Perkins&Will, said that his firm’s design aesthetic focused on scale, identity and community.

“Each of these drivers strategically shaped the highly bespoke design concept for La Playa Residence Hall,” he said. “This makes the project truly unique compared to traditionally shaped residence halls. By increasing bed capacity and transforming the student experience, an intentionally informed framework, the University will absolutely differentiate itself when it comes to recruitment and retention.”

La Playa Residence Hall will aim to open for students in time for the fall semester of 2026.

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LONG BEACH, Calif.—General contractor Clark Construction has finished a pair of educational projects at the Cal State Long Beach campus, located in Southern California about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

One effort was to expand the college’s art institute, which was formerly known as the University Art Museum but will be known hereafter as the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum. According to a recent release from Clark, the expansion doubles the museum’s total exhibition space to 4,000 square feet. The addition features a 15-foot, diamond-shaped glass vestibule at the redesigned museum entrance.

In total, the museum is now 11,000 square feet in area, and offers modern education facilities, galleries with moveable walls, outdoor gardens and storage facilities. Solar panels and sustainable construction materials used throughout were intended to help the museum win LEED Silver certification.

The reimagined museum is scheduled to open this month to visitors.

Clark’s other project at CSULB entailed renovating the Horn Center, which used to be a computer lab and student advising facility and morphing it into state-of-the-art classrooms and lecture halls. The Horn Center is now one of the largest computer labs across the entire CSU system.

Both the Horn Center and Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum were completed on the requisite 17-month schedule. The jobs represent some 100,000 hours of labor for local craftspeople.

Pfeiffer Partner Architects reportedly led the design for the projects.

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