This 2,400-square-foot classroom painting studio at the Elena Baskin Center for the Visual Arts provides instruction, work and storage space for graduate-level art students. Our challenge was to create a new studio space that was compatible with the strong roof forms of nearby structures while also improving the building’s spatial organization and day lighting. We sited the new building adjacent to existing classroom buildings both to preserve existing trees and to create a new, outdoor work courtyard. While the new studio orients perpendicular to the adjacent buildings, its north-facing clerestory windows are rotated off-grid to capture a swath of blue-sky set between tall redwoods. The new studio’s clerestories have a shallower section than those of its neighbors which provides it with a taller interior while still maintaining a scale and form sympathetic to surrounding buildings.