OFFICEUNTITLED turns vacant santa monica office floor into school
Transforming a vacant corporate office floor inside BXP's Colorado Center into a temporary elementary school for 300 displaced students after the 2025 Palisades Fire.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- OFFICEUNTITLED and Santa Monica partnered to turn an empty office into a temporary school.
- 300 students returned to class within three weeks using an emergency occupancy strategy.
- Sustainable redesign retained existing carpets and building systems to avoid demolition.
- Colorful graphics and demountable glass partitions completely transformed the corporate floor.
After the 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed the campus of Village School, a 300-student elementary school serving kindergarten through sixth grade, the community faced a problem considerably bigger than finding a few spare classrooms. Working with the City of Santa Monica and architecture studio OFFICEUNTITLED, the school took over a vacant corporate office floor inside BXP’s Colorado Center, turning an environment built for adult working life into a temporary campus where students could return, gather and begin rebuilding a sense of normality.
The first version arrived remarkably quickly. Through an emergency occupancy strategy, students were able to return to school within three weeks, with temporary classrooms initially defined by furniture rather than permanent walls and protected circulation routes introduced to meet life-safety requirements. A second phase, completed over a single summer, developed the makeshift arrangement into a more established interim campus with purpose-built classrooms, laboratories, administrative areas and shared learning spaces. Temporary, in this case, became rather thoroughly designed.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Graphics do part of the navigational work. OFFICEUNTITLED deconstructed Village School’s logo into five colorful figures distributed around the campus and paired them with matching ceiling elements, allowing wayfinding to double as a game of recognition. As pupils progress from kindergarten through sixth grade, the individual elements gradually assemble into the complete school identity. The strategy turns circulation through an otherwise anonymous commercial floor into a sequence of visual cues and small discoveries — useful when the building was never exactly expecting a population carrying backpacks and crayons.
The conversion of vacant commercial real estate into public facilities or educational institutions highlights an emerging trend in adaptive reuse, especially as hybrid work leaves many corporate floors empty. By choosing to preserve existing elements like office carpets and utilizing demountable glass systems, the architects not only met urgent crisis-response timelines but also demonstrated the remarkable flexibility of modern commercial architecture to absorb unexpected civic functions.
Because there was no certainty that the interim campus would become a long-term home, the intervention deliberately avoids unnecessary demolition. Existing finishes and building systems, including the office carpet, were retained wherever possible, while paint, graphics, modular furniture and selective partitions do most of the transformative work. Partial-height classroom walls preserve daylight and visibility across the floor while leaving existing mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems untouched overhead.
Standardized partitions reduce material use and simplify construction, while demountable glass-door systems can eventually be removed and reused when Village School returns to a permanent campus. Beyond solving an urgent practical problem, the project points toward another possible future for underused commercial real estate: one in which an empty office does not necessarily have to wait for another office tenant. Here, adaptive reuse becomes part of a broader recovery process, providing the displaced school community with somewhere to regroup while quietly expanding the definition of what a corporate building can contain.
Source: designboom
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