Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences has long been a haven for creative talents, and a new project aims to maximize this potential for decades to come.
Construction recently began on the school’s new Bezdek Center for the Performing Arts, a 55,000 square foot complex that will serve as the new home for Crossroads’ acclaimed arts program. The project, designed by SPF:a, will include a 650-seat main auditorium, a 100-person recital hall, spaces for filmmaking and music, and a new Crossroads School Equity & Justice Institute.
Renderings of the site, anticipated to be completed in early 2026, envision these spaces linked by a courtyard that SPF:a Founder and Design Principal Zoltan Pali called a “major strong point” for the project. Pali stated he wanted to continue the “feel” of the current school site, which sees students go back and forth between department classrooms as if they were in a scaled-down cityscape.
The architectural firm was able to earn design rights on the “highly desired project” from its experience in local arts, including previous endeavors like the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and renovations on the historic Pantages Theater. Pali said that he personally was impressed by the school’s focus on the performing arts and interest in “educating their student body (on) a very highly advanced level.”
“How they see their school, how they see how their student body interacts with the community is what really, truly inspired us,” Pali said.
The firm is concentrating on making “simple buildings” that match the industrial nature of the Mid-City neighborhood, while also keeping in mind the specificity of arts configurations. Within the spaces, SPF:a will be turning to variable sound absorption systems, which creates acoustically flexible rooms by changing the sound absorption. This can either make rooms less or more reverberant depending on the need.
“Somebody who might not be involved in (design) might think, okay, you’re creating a room with a bunch of seats (and) a stage, right?,” Pali said. “But in a facility where you have film, where you have drama, where you have spoken word or you have music, that room or that sort of space needs to be able to acoustically handle all those elements, and they all require different types of acoustics. So one of the challenges of the project was to create, in a cost-effective way, a way to tune the room for the different types of performance.”
Another design choice is integrating elements inspired by musical elements, building in shapes such as the body of a violin and the bell of a trumpet. Pali admits that although he’s not an artist, there is “artistry” to the design process, and wanted to bring these unique elements into the performing arts center.
“I remember as a young kid never really being very good at any musical instrument … but I was always fascinated with the object, (with) how they were made and the shapes and the forms and things that came out of that … and I tried to bring a little bit of that into this project in a very, very simple way,” Pali said.