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.
bird’s-eye view of the campus | images by Vittoria Zupicich Photography
IMAGINARIUMS REPLACE THE WATER COOLER
Rather than reproducing a conventional corridor-and-classroom model, OFFICEUNTITLED looked to qualities of Village School’s former campus, where informal learning, group play and discovery extended beyond the classroom. The architects introduced a network of spaces they call ‘Imaginariums’: playful environments distributed throughout the floor for exploration, collaboration and less structured forms of learning. Two internal boulevards, Bookworm Boulevard and Growing Grove, organize circulation through what remains a deep and unusually large office plan.
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.
main entry and central commons at The Village School’s interim campus
ADAPTIVE REUSE WITH A LIGHT TOUCH
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.
existing entranceway adapted for the interim campus
demountable glass partition for 5th grade classroom opening onto the central commons
rounded corridor with exposed metal studs and colorful wall panels
little’s library featuring open book storage and flexible seating
colorful circulation corridor with exposed mechanical systems
science lab and collaborative learning space
art studio with integrated sink and worktables
indoor-outdoor learning space with direct access to the terrace
existing filing cabinets repurposed as student lockers
project info:
name: Village School at Colorado Center
designer: OFFICEUNTITLED | @officeuntitled
images: Vittoria Zupicich Photography | @vittoriazupicich
The post OFFICEUNTITLED turns vacant santa monica office floor into school after the palisades fire appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.