Star Trek: Everything We Know About Starfleet Academy
6. You Had Me At 'Contiguous'
You can't spell 'ex astris, scientia' without 'atria,' and its singular 'atrium' is all anyone who's not been hiding under a rock on the Presidio has been talking about! To match the vast array of acting talent, Starfleet Academy also promises the biggest behemoth of a standing set to have ever had 'ever' in front of it in the history of Star Trek.
And nothing says 'big' more than 'Mega'! If you pop that adjective before 'Stage,' you get Canada's largest at Pinewood Toronto Studios — a whopping 45,900 square feet (just shy of 14,000 square metres)! It is there that is housed, as Variety's Adam B. Vary revealed in March 2024, the Academy's "central academic atrium," which is two-stories high, has a mess hall, amphitheatre, trees, catwalks, and last but not least, "a striking view of the Golden Gate Bridge in a single, contiguous space".
With words adjacent, that is, therefore, equally confirmation that the set is set (back) in its historic San Francisco locale, further affirmed by Alex Kurtzman when he told the LA Times in May of this year (2024): "Right now we're in the middle of answering the question what does San Francisco, where the Academy is, look like in the 32nd century".
We'd had reason to wonder whether Starfleet Academy would even return to a planet, let alone the West Coast, as on initial post-Burn re-opening, it was housed at (floating) Federation HQ. Even after the destruction of much of Starfleet, however, and Earth's withdrawal from the Federation, they clearly maintained the old Academy site, grounds, and sturdy study tree, still standing in People of Earth. All that's missing now is a hologram of Boothby!
It's equally worth noting, by the by, that the comparatively diminutive Stage 8 (18,000 square feet) at Pinewood Toronto Studios was renamed "The Star Trek Stage" in honour of Star Trek: Discovery during filming there of the final scenes of the series finale.