The school’s central walkway, known in Diamond Ranch parlance as “The Panther Path.” (Photos by C-M.)
Looking like the San Andreas fault in the wake of the Big One, the principal walkway through Thom Mayne’s Diamond Ranch High School makes its way through buildings that resemble craggy canyons of rock. Set on a sloping, hillside in Diamond Bar, Calif., about 30 miles east of downtown L.A., the structures are now a decade old. The design remains starkly beautiful (the metal exteriors shimmer, like a mirage, in direct sunlight), but like the surrounding desert environment, they are also quite forbidding. Diamond Ranch is serious testosterone architecture. There’s an abundance of corrugated metal, sharp angles and long, dim corridors that frame the outdoors in ways reminiscent of miner’s tunnels. And then there’s the relentless concrete, which is rarely interrupted by nature, even though the school’s principal public spaces all reside outdoors.
The vice principal who led us around the school — and who had been there since they first opened — said that while he enjoyed the shapes of the buildings, they did present plenty of challenges in terms of policing the campus. Odd angles, obscured staircases and dark passages provide plenty of places to smoke and suck face. On an aesthetic level, the combined greys of the concrete and metal leave many parts of the campus feeling frigid. Some classrooms had spectacular valley views, while others made do with indirect light and the sight of steel trusses. The students we spoke with, however, generally dug the structures. Reared on a lifetime of Star Trek and Star Wars and lots of other star stuff, they felt that the futuristic car-commercial look was kinda cool — and set their school apart from the bland concrete lumps elsewhere in the county.
I didn’t love everything about the school — the barren interior courtyards couldn’t be bleaker — but I totally respect it’s aggressive virility. Diamond Ranch is the Daniel Craig of architecture: hard and edgy, with a rugged sex appeal — the type of structures that can take a rope to the nuts and still say, “Come and get me motherfuckers.” And I gotta confess, I find that kinda hot.
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Continue reading ‘School of Rock: Thom Mayne’s Diamond Ranch High School.’
