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Creating great works of art can take time — and sometimes creating the spaces to make that art does, too. The Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA) saw at least 15 years’ worth of planning become real this fall with the opening of the school’s new Roy and Ruth Rogers Wing, adjacent to its main campus on San Antonio Circle in Mountain View.
CSMA held a soft opening for the 3,300-square-foot addition in September and has been phasing classes into the new building.
“Really, the impetus for this entire project was to serve more students in the community, and that means a lot of different things,” said CSMA’s Director of Marketing & Communications Erin Brownfield.
CSMA offers education in music and visual arts for all ages, from preschoolers to adults, with an array of programming that includes music classes and private lessons for a variety of instruments in classical, jazz and contemporary styles; music theory and composition; art classes in a variety of media; private art lessons; one- or two-day art workshops; summer art camps and summer music workshops. CSMA also regularly hosts community concerts and has an art gallery on campus that holds public exhibitions.
At the moment, the school is offering both online and in-person classes.
CSMA is one of seven nonprofit organizations serving Mountain View residents that benefit from the Voice’s annual Holiday Fund. Donations to the fund are divided equally among the nonprofits and are administered by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation at no cost, so 100% of contributions go to the recipients.
The new wing was a much-needed addition, as the school has long seen more demand for its programming than its campus could accommodate.
“The Finn Center, our main campus, opened in 2004 and within one or two years, it was already filled, with a waiting list,” said CSMA’s Director of Development Chiung-chi Chen.
The school purchased the land that the new wing sits on in 2006 with the help of Roy and Ruth Rogers, longtime CSMA supporters for whom the new wing is named. Ruth Rogers, who died in September 2017, launched an in-school music program at Bubb Elementary School in 1981, which CSMA took over in 2002 and used as a model for its Music4All program in local public elementary schools.
CSMA had been using the land for extra parking, and it was also home to an auto repair shop under a long-term lease. The shop closed about five years ago and CSMA launched a campaign in 2017 to help fund the new wing. Seed funders of the project included members of CSMA’s Board of Directors, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Morgan Family Foundation, Asset Management Company, Ruth and Roy Rogers and Stephen Finn.
“The entire fundraising process —the capital campaign — has had its ups and downs and it’s definitely a big milestone for the school to pull this off. And we are very proud of the fact that we have about 250 donors from the community, from our school and from our families,” Chen said.
Construction of the wing began in September 2020 and was completed in August 2021. The building was designed by Artik Art & Architecture in a contemporary style consistent with the rest of the campus. The firm specializes in designing for educational institutions and other organizations, and has a long track record of working with South Bay and Peninsula schools.
“We have a lot of demand for our space. I think we also just needed some more specific types of space that we could expand into,” said Brownfield, citing a wide range of needs, from spaces better suited to the school’s youngest students — preschoolers — to places more accommodating to group performances and recitals.
The Roy and Ruth Rogers Wing was built with both specialized and flexible spaces to help CSMA meet a variety of needs.
The state-of-the-art facility offers additional classrooms, a digital lab, a room for ensemble performances and a multipurpose room, which can be used for anything from art to preschool classes.
By accommodating a variety of classes, the new wing has freed up space in CSMA’s original building, the Finn Center, to make more room for private lessons. In a cost-saving measure, some rooms in the original building have been repurposed for private lessons, rather than constructing sound-proof rooms from scratch.
New landscaping, including low-water plants, was installed as part of the project.
“It also adds a green space in the back. Typically in the summer, we have hundreds of campers doing the art camp with us. … It’s really nice to have additional outdoor space so that we can hold more activities outdoors and allow campers to spread out,” Brownfield said, noting that young students often enjoyed spending time in a courtyard at Finn Center during breaks, even before the pandemic made outdoor space more of a necessity.
One improvement brought by the project may sound less compelling than new classrooms and green space, but will address a longstanding challenge at CSMA: The new wing adds badly needed parking, Brownfield and Chen said.
“We have free community concerts. We have people from all ages that take classes and (perform in) ensembles and everything, so parking was a big issue for us. The new wing actually added about 51 new parking spaces and improved the safety of drop off and pick up for the students,” Chen said.
Though the pandemic has meant that the school is not offering as much in-person programming at the moment, the timing of the new wing opening has already made it easier to accommodate offering certain types of lessons while staying safe — voice lessons, for example, can be held in larger classrooms rather than music studios, providing better airflow and spacing between people.
“We’re still imagining how we can use the full space as we fully reopen over the next year, but definitely things like summer camps and lessons that require more space, are going to be very well served by having the additional 3,300 square feet,” Brownfield said.
