Poor Marks for UCSD : Design: The Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies ignores basic planning principles.

While prominent architects have been stocking UC San Diego with a new generation of aggressive architecture, no one seems to be watching out for the welfare of the campus.

A new campus master plan was approved by the school’s Community Planning Committee last July, but it came too late to have any impact on the newest campus complex, the $8.5-million Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Even without the new plan, the architects for the new buildings showed surprising disregard for basic principles of good planning. The graduate school buildings, designed by San Francisco-based architects Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz (KMD), most certainly would not have been allowed under the new master plan.

Kaplan McLaughlin was hired almost five years ago, well before work on the master plan began in 1988. They were also handed the job of designing the campus’ new Price Center, which opened last year. The three-building graduate school complex shows the same kind of insensitivity for campus atmosphere, history and planning as the Price Center.

Among the key elements of the new campus plan is a “ridge walk,” a north-south pedestrian mall that sweeps along the western side of the campus.

“A pedestrian promenade had always been a part of campus plans,” said architect John Kriken, a partner in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who directed the drafting of the new master plan. “It was defined in the very first plan for the campus because it was part of the old highway right-of-way.”

But the graduate school complex violates this zone of open space. While most buildings are set back 15 or 20 feet from the actual concrete promenade, with lawn and trees as buffers, a sharp corner of one of the new buildings juts prominently into view.

In a phone interview, McLaughlin defended this projection.

“We wanted a strong announcement of the building. We brought this prow form forward to the mall. What you see is a very strong prow form emerging.” In reality, the prow analogy isn’t apparent to pedestrians, who perceive an obstructive solid wall.

The graduate school complex is laid out in a triangle, with the base along the pedestrian mall. The project includes a circular lecture hall near the center of the triangle’s base, an angled faculty-administration building along two sides of the triangle, and a classroom-library wing along the third side.

Apart from its affront to campus planning, the new project has other problems. While its central plaza is a great outdoor people place, it doesn’t communicate with the three buildings around it. Entrances are ill-defined. Unnecessary walls on either side of the stairs leading down into the library portion of the library-classroom wing make this entry feel too boxed in. The austere concrete of the plaza doesn’t live up to the richness of the building surfaces.

Working on a tight budget, the architects have given the complex a look of quality by covering it with affordable and great-looking Jerusalem stone in a variety of textures and tones. But this finesse is undercut with busy, overbearing hardware, especially the steel railings that hang like a hormone-fed Erector Set on the plaza side of the administration building.

Instead of relating to neighboring buildings and working with a palette of materials designated for this particular campus “neighborhood,” the graduate school complex is a real chest-beater. While the architects didn’t have the new plan in hand, Kriken suggested that more sensitive responses to contexts might have improved both the Price Center and the IRPS complex.

In some respects, the architects didn’t have much nearby architectural heritage to work with. The closest campus buildings are the Supercomputer Center, a glaring mega-box of white walls and reflective glass, and the Spanish Colonial Institute of the Americas, which would have been more at home in Old Town.

But the nearby student housing to the south--simple buildings buffered by trees--shows how less aggressive architecture can be a more harmonious alternative. And there is the longtime image of the campus as a grove of eucalyptus trees.

Both the Price Center and the graduate school complex fail to make strong links with important, nearby pedestrian circulation paths.

There are numerous sidewalks and paths through the IRPS complex, but these don’t relate strongly enough to the pedestrian mall. You’d expect the plaza to be open to the pedestrian walk, but the large, round lecture hall closes off what could have been enticing views of people and landscaping with the new project’s plaza.

Some students seem to like the contemporary energy of the graduate school complex, but those involved with campus architecture don’t approve.

“The design review board is not happy with this kind of solution,” said Boone Hellman, assistant vice chancellor for the office of facilities design and construction, who wasn’t around when Kaplan McLaughlin was hired. Hellman was referring to a campus design review board created in 1988, too late to have a crack at this design.

“Do I approve of this building? Not at all,” said architect Gary Allen, one of two local architects on the review board. In fact, Allen said, the review board asked the architects to reduce or soften the form of the offending projection, but was told it was too late.

“They knew about the walkway, and yet the building intrudes to a degree that is not very processional, nor is it done with candor--that little triangular portion of building is nothing more than the end of a building without announcing a portal or a pedestrian direction or any focal characteristic of the architecture.”

The selection of Kaplan McLaughlin to simultaneously design both the Price Center and the new graduate school complex doesn’t promote architectural diversity. The two Kaplan McLaughlin buildings, in two vastly different locations, use very similar forms and materials, ones which have no campus precedent.

At least the newer building doesn’t use the loud ocher employed at the Price Center. As Allen and another review board member, architect Rob Quigley, noted, future nearby buildings will be forced to somehow incorporate this mustard tone if they are to further the cause of architectural harmony on campus.

Kaplan McLaughlin stands by the design. Typically, buildings on American college campuses have been isolated objects which don’t define the public spaces between them, he said. By breaking the graduate school complex into three structures, grouped around distinct outdoor areas, he hoped to give the UCSD campus a new kind of asset.

Unfortunately, Kaplan McLaughlin’s scheme wasn’t fully realized. A row of trees which would have defined an outdoor “cloister” for the use of the faculty--tucked in the crook of the angular administration wing--apparently wasn’t in the budget. So the central plaza merges directly into this faculty space. An overhead structure which would have unified a central outdoor path through the project was also axed from the budget.

There is some cause for hope at UCSD. The innovative Philadelphia architect Adele Santos is being recruited as the dean of UCSD’s new School of Architecture, scheduled to open in 1991. Assuming she accepts, and whatever her role in campus planning may be, having one of the nation’s top architectural minds on hand is bound to make a difference for the better.

DESIGN NOTES: City architect Mike Stepner and consultant Donald Stastny have named the jury for selecting an architect for the city of San Diego’s new downtown civic center: it includes Santos, plus New York artist Houston Conwill; landscape architect and Columbia University Professor Paul Friedberg; shopping center developer and San Diegan Ernest Hahn; former San Diego Planning Commission Chairwoman Dorothy Leonard; internationally known architect Moshe Safdie; and architect and UC Berkeley architecture professor Daniel Solomon. . . . UCSD’s May 5 daylong architecture symposium, titled “Shaping the City,” will feature Solomon, along with architect and planner Stanton Eckstut, shopping center developer James Rouse and architect Barton Myers. Assuming Santos signs on as architecture dean, she’s a good bet to moderate.