CRONOGRAMA VALORADO DEL PMA

2.74 Aerial view, UCLA Photo: UCLA Capital Projects

popularity amongst Californian educational institutions. Northern Italy seemed an appropriate reference for the campus because of the similarities in climate and landscape. Regent Edward Dickson, UCLA’s co-founder, believed the school should have a distinct physical character expressive of its individual situation.¹⁰⁸

Royce Hall was designed by Allison. Strikingly modelled upon San Ambrogio in Milan, it has a two-storey arcaded and vaulted loggia between paired irregular towers. As at San Ambrogio, coloured bricks and tiles enliven various sections of Royce’s wall surface. Its open arcaded cloisters intimate the original intention to connect it with flanking buildings. Facing Royce, Kelham designed the Powell Library (1930). A brick and terracotta façade and red tile roof was sheathed over a steel and concrete frame to create a stately Romanesque structure with octagonal dome. San Ambrosio and San Sepolcro provided specific Northern Italian models. Paired with Royce and Powell were the Chemistry (now Haines Hall) and Physics (now Humanities) buildings, creating a space known as Dickson Plaza (Figure 2.76). The plaza between these four structures and the steps and terraces leading westward down the sloping terrain reflect the

architects’ original vision to create an Italian hilltop town upon Beaux-Arts axial foundations. To the south of this group, Kelham designed Moore Hall (1930) in the same Romanesque vein. Terracotta and brickwork patterns embellish the entrance façade, from which projects a gabled portico with octagonal columns. To the west, the U-shaped outline creates a landscaped court. Together with the University Residence (1930) and the Men’s and Women’s Gymnasiums (1932), Royce, Powell, Chemistry, Physics and Moore formed the original campus buildings. United by a commonality of material, scale and the Romanesque, these buildings form a distinctive, integrated campus nucleus.¹⁰⁹

Landscaping was devised to complement the Lombardy theme.

Impressively spacious, Dickson Plaza is a brick and buff stone paved court with terracotta balustrades. From it descends a red brick staircase named Janss Steps, which extends down the stepped elevation to the western campus (Figure 2.77). With the erection of Franz Hall in 1940, the Lombard theme was first extended to southern campus. Franz was planned as the cornerstone of a southern science complex, today called the Court of Sciences. The three-storey structure 2.75 Royce Hall, UCLA

Photo: Eugene Buchko

employs an economized Romanesque idiom, complete with tile roof and tower.

The post-war years saw significant departures in the planning of the campus. Allison’s revision of Kelham’s plan included the consequential decision to locate the Medical School on the south portion of the Westwood site, rather than off-site as Berkeley had done. This necessitated a dense arrangement of high-rise structures upon south campus. From 1946, the gully to the east of Dickson Plaza was filled in to provide extra building space upon which was constructed Dodd Hall (1948), Perloff Hall (1952) and Schoenberg Music Building (1955) surrounding a large paved expanse, Dickson Court. With these, central campus was completed. Dodd Hall marked an important turning point in campus development. Its round arches, square tower and decorative brickwork patterns marked the last of UCLA’s Lombard Romanesque buildings. Upon the appointment of Welton Becket as supervising architect in 1948, the Romanesque style was discontinued. Its high construction costs were unachievable in the post-war economy, while its historicism seemed at odds with the philosophy and requirements of modern life. UCLA’s governors

pressed for a plainer style consistent with the red brick and stone of the original fabric, and succeeding years saw campus expansion employ various architectural styles.

In the 1950s, UCLA’s rapid growth spurt was clothed in a transitional architecture, compromising between the Romanesque and modern.

Engineering I was constructed in 1950 on the western edge of campus by the firm Allison and Rible. Constructed of red brick and concrete, the concrete was painted a buff colour to concede to the Romanesque. Perloff Hall occupied a prominent site, bounding the newly formed Dickson Court to the north. Keen to maintain architectural unity with the neighbouring Dickson Plaza buildings, architect Paul Robinson Hunter clad the concrete building with red brick and tile roofing, yet its clean, angular lines and absence of decoration signal its contemporary genesis.

Kelham’s campus plan envisaged a student population of 5,000.

Yet in 1960 the University of California’s president Clark Kerr instituted a new master plan for all the system’s campuses, which ordained for UCLA a new enrolment total of 27,500. This tremendous growth necessitated tremendous planning consequences for UCLA. Not 2.76 Dickson Plaza, UCLA

Photo: Alan Nyri

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A AT L O S A N G E L E S

least was the parking problem. Little space had originally been allotted to parking, yet the new master plan compelled space for 20,000 vehicles. Becket planned a series of multi-level car parks throughout the campus filtering off a new ring road, aimed to minimize inner-campus traffic. Becket also focused upon organization of land use. The campus was subdivided into three sectors: north campus, including graduate studies, arts and social sciences; central campus, combining education, English, architecture, law, and music;

and south campus, housing engineering, mathematics, sciences and medicine. The north campus was developed in the 1960s.

Not only were any concessions to the Romanesque abandoned in favour of individual, modern design, but the Beaux-Arts principles of symmetry and clarity were replaced by an informal, capricious approach. The exigency to provide space for UCLA’s rapid expansion seems physically manifest in the tall profiles and loose planning of its buildings. North campus buildings were planned with minimum footprints to maximize space for landscaped open areas, rendering upward growth inescapable. Bunche Hall (1964) symbolizes this trend. Looming over north campus, Bunche is UCLA’s tallest structure at 11 storeys. Architect Maynard Lyndon elevated it two storeys from ground level so as not to obstruct pedestrian circulation. Its appearance is wholly alien to the familiar red brick and limestone of central campus, and its protruding square windows earned it the nickname of the ‘Waffle’. Undoubtedly it has proved UCLA’s most controversial and disliked structure.¹¹⁰

Since the mid-1980s, the campus has undergone comprehensive remodelling. A running joke prevails at the Los Angeles branch of the University of California system that UCLA is actually an acronym of

‘Under Construction in Los Angeles’. In 1984, the campus occupied 350 acres; by 2005 it had grown to 528. The campus continues to be an incessant hive of building activity. Recent building has increasingly utilized star power. I. M. Pei has designed the replacement hospital, Raphael Viñoly the CNSI building, and Cesar Pelli a new research complex. Despite these heavyweight names, though, recent construction has been judicious in its sensitivity to UCLA’s architectural heritage. The contextual materials of red brick and limestone are consistently employed, creating a distinctive ‘UCLA feel’. Harry Cobb’s Anderson School of Management (1995) reinterprets the traditions of Dickson Plaza in its strong horizontal lines and red brick and beige

colouring, and thus extends the UCLA identity to its peripheral site on north campus. Connection to central campus is enforced by the axial path that extends north from the base of Janss Steps to a paved plaza at the centre of the complex. Its pathways use the same type of geometric paving of brick inlays and buff-coloured concrete seen in Dickson Plaza and Court, a device which enhances continuity across campus. Pelli’s Biomedical Research Building and Orthopaedic Hospital Research Centre (2007) similarly gives itself over to red brick and cast stone, evoking traditional references within a contemporary silhouette. Its curving elevations echo the sweeping path of the periphery road, and curl around the existing life sciences building.

A new pathway forms a strong link between the eastern campus entrance opposite and the Court of Sciences. Richard Meier’s Broad Centre (2006) has a highly contemporary exterior finish of concrete, steel, glass and teak, yet seeks integration with the old campus by incorporating bricks into its paving and courtyards.

Yet notwithstanding this incessant construction, UCLA sustains an exceptional commitment to cultivating its open spaces, which is its signal achievement. Roughly a third of the total site is open space. Throughout campus lie pockets of green or plazas creating an outdoor environment that consistently receives praise. Open space preserves include Dickson Plaza, the Murphy Sculpture Garden and Meyerhoff Park, the large sloping lawn flanking Janss Steps in central campus. The Sculpture Garden fills the heart of north campus. One of the most celebrated parts of campus, over 70 sculptures are displayed within a five-acre park landscaped with stone walls, lawns, sitting areas and well-conceived planting. Formal paved plazas on campus include the Court of Sciences, the Inverted Fountain before Franz Hall, and the Powell Library courtyard, a newly developed area designed for quiet reading between the south wings of the building.

Many of UCLA’s buildings have U-shape plans, investing the campus with enclosed, intimate spaces, such as the courtyards of Moore and Rolfe Halls, which hold hallowed places in campus memory. South campus is, however, underprivileged in the space given over to landscape. The entrance gateway designed in 1991 by Hodgetts

& Fung Design Associates, therefore, significantly contributed to the environment. It consisted of a new entry extending northwards from the southernmost tip of campus with a pavilion, pool and soft and hard landscaping. The red and beige paving that is carried

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through from the entrance into south campus brings UCLA’s base iconography into this precinct.¹¹¹

The red brick and buff patterning of the network of pedestrian ways visually binds the campus together. The campus has strong pedestrian axes, which inform its circulation patterns. The axis from Janss Steps to Dickson Court, the original east–west alignment, is the most prominent amongst these. Bruin Walk forms another important east–west channel, providing a pivotal link between central campus and the north-western residential area, while the pathway alongside the Biomedical Science Research Building is an important pedestrian link between a campus entrance and the Court of Sciences. Unlike some urban campuses such as New York University, through which you drive as an extension of the urban street grid, UCLA allows only service vehicles to breach the peripheral loop road, thus firmly demarcating the boundary between town and gown and creating an auspicious pedestrian environment.

The north, central and south precincts of campus each have a distinct character. Upon central campus, the Romanesque and 1950s transitional buildings are arranged in geometric rigidity. With its formal patterns and defined open spaces, it is a Beaux-Arts tour-de-force. North and south campuses reacted against its order and coherence. Circulation is organized by free-form garden paths that entreat relaxed perambulation, and building style is based upon individual design rather than stylistic uniformity. South campus is overwhelmingly the most densely developed campus precinct, and the least successful. Its indistinct planning ideology is represented in its sprawling distribution of buildings and scarcity of open spaces, which create a feeling of engulfment amid a maze of functional yet homogenous brick buildings. The campus’s chief shortcoming is that UCLA’s main entrance is through south campus. Insensitive post-war planning resulted in a mediocre medical complex, yet it is this that forms UCLA’s face to the outside world. Landscaping has ameliorated the situation, with the addition of the 1990s gateway, screens of eucalyptus trees, and low brick walls that form a continuing southern boundary.¹¹²

In broad terms, UCLA’s hard and soft landscaping has consistently melded the different generations of campus architecture. Niches of handsome open space throughout campus are visible, accessible and well-used. The most iconic is Dickson Plaza, surrounded by

the Romanesque buildings that dominate the campus core. For the past two decades, UCLA has preceded over a reversal of the philosophy that each building should be the creative statement of the individual planner, which took hold of the campus in the 1960s.

Planning, architecture, and landscaping have sought the cultivation of a consistent, integrated environment, respectful but not imitative of the brick, tile and limestone colouring and forms of Royce Hall and Powell Library. The result has been a strengthening of the elements that make UCLA a special and memorable place.

2.77 Janss Steps, UCLA Photo: Chris Welch/Gardiner & Theobald

2.78 Plan, University of Cambridge

After 800 years of opulent architectural patronage and fervent institutional continuity, the University of Cambridge is one of the world’s most attractive university environments. Lining the city’s labyrinth of cobbled streets, its buildings and the open spaces that they enclose are theatres of memory, testimony to the illustrious history of the institution and its colleges. Its environment has grown serendipitously, rather than to any pre-formed growth plan, but this study will highlight the most distinguishing episodes in its formation.

Despite their reciprocity, the physical fabric of the colleges and the university itself has developed along markedly different lines, the university proving much more tardy in distinguishing its presence within the city. For many years after its foundation in 1209 the institution had no premises of its own. Private lodgings provided rooms for lectures while ceremonies and meetings were held in Great St Mary’s parish church. Hostels soon provided accommodation for scholars, and colleges gradually appeared alongside them. The first college, Peterhouse, was established in 1284, and in the following century it was followed in quick succession by a flurry of other foundations. Benefiting from generous endowments and owning their own property, the colleges supplanted the hostels and little material evidence of them remains. Peterhouse typified the development pattern of the early colleges. Initially residing within modest houses, in 1286 construction on a hall began. Expansion was slow, and the college evolved piecemeal as funds permitted. Early colleges like Peterhouse were unassuming in their appearance. It was not until the fifteenth century that a discernable ‘collegiate’ grouping emerged at Peterhouse, with buildings ranged around a court.¹¹³

The Cambridge colleges followed a distinctive format:

Among these narrow, ugly and dirty streets, are tumbled in, as it were at random (for the whole place looks as if it had been dancing to Amphion’s music, and he had left off in the middle of a very complicated figure) some of the most beautiful academical buildings in the world. However their style of architecture may vary, according to the period at which they were built or rebuilt, they agree in one essential feature: all the colleges are constructed in quadrangles or courts; and, as in the course of years the population of every college