Add as a preferred source on Google

Texas State University Breaks Ground on Media Building

  • By Matt Jones
  • 08/23/21

Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, broke ground last week on a new media building. Live Oak Hall will serve students and faculty from the College of Fine Arts and Communication and feature amenities like a film soundstage, a TV studio, a recording mix classroom, an editing lab, a foley room for sound effects, and administrative offices and classrooms. The facility comes with an estimated cost of $10 million and is scheduled to open its doors in time for the fall 2022 semester.

University officials said that the new building comes as the Department of Theater and Dance continues to grow; theatre enrollment has grown by 53% across the last five years, and the university’s film concentration is also picking up steam. Live Oak Hall will also provide students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication with their own television studio for the first time. Its media lab and classroom space will facilitate television news courses, and the new studio and control room will play home to the “Bobcat Update,” the university newscast.

Other amenities include greenscreen technology for the soundstage and television studio; a sound recording classroom with surround-sound capabilities and an isolation sound recording booth; and broadband fiber for live broadcast streaming capabilities. Students will also use the studio to produce sports and interview programs.

“San Marcos is situated between Austin and San Antonio, two cities with vibrant independent film communities where film graduates are in demand,” said the university in a news release. “With the advent of digital streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu, the global demand for graduates with both creative and technical skills will continue to rise, and Texas State is uniquely situated to create a program that feeds both the curricular demand of students and the industry that will hire them.”

The 10,291-square-foot facility was designed by project architects the Lawrence Group, which has offices in Austin and New York and specializes in higher education and media/broadcast studios.

About the Author

Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • Preparing for the Next Era of Healthcare Education, Innovation

    Across the country, public universities and community colleges are accelerating investments in healthcare education facilities as part of a broader strategy to address workforce shortages, modernize outdated infrastructure, and expand clinical training capacity. These projects, which are often located at the center of campus health and science districts, are no longer limited to traditional classrooms.

  • Malibu High School Campus Completes $102M Phase 1 of Construction

    Malibu High School in Malibu, Calif., recently announced that it has completed phase 1 of construction for its new campus, a news release reports. The first phase consisted of developing and modernizing the site of a former elementary school into a new, 70,000-square-foot, two-story facility.

  • Recent University of Pennsylvania Projects Receive LEED Certifications

    The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Penn., recently announced that three of its recent construction projects have earned LEED certifications, according to university news. The Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology (VLEST) received a LEED Platinum certification, Amy Gutmann Hall a LEED Gold, and the OTT Center for Track and Field a LEED silver.

  • University of Rhode Island, Gilbane Partner for Three New Residence Halls

    The University of Rhode Island in Kingston, R.I., recently announced a public-private partnership with construction development firm Gilbane, according to a news release. Gilbane will soon start construction on three new residence halls with a total of 1,100 beds: two with apartment-style suites in northwest campus, and a reconstruction of the Graduate Village Apartments for graduate students.

Digital Edition