N.Y. Artist Helps Wed UCSD Lab to Setting

For the most part, new buildings at UC San Diego have disregarded their settings. Until a few years ago, this was a campus of low-key wooden structures set among the eucalyptuses.

Into their midst in recent years dropped such intergalactic interlopers as the Price Center and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies--contemporary buildings that would work better in a more commercial or industrial setting.

In contrast, the new Molecular Biology Research Facility Unit II, designed by architects Moore Ruble Yudell in collaboration with San Diego landscape architect Andy Spurlock and New York artist Jackie Ferrara, is one of the best buildings on campus. It proves that a contemporary structure housing cutting-edge research can cut a subtle profile. The building was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Houston, which has a history of backing well-designed research facilities across the country.

Aside from its fine design, the building marks the first time the Stuart Collection, which oversees public art on campus, has been involved so early in the design process. Mary Beebe, the collection’s director, suggested that artist Ferrara join the design team.

Ferrara first met architect Charles Moore at Max Protetch Gallery in New York in the early ‘80s, when Moore’s drawings were in one room, while Ferrara’s art was in another.

Moore and Ferrara had a meeting to test their compatibility, and, despite cultural differences, they hit it off.

Unlike other new campus buildings, which fail to address the campus master plan and its key circulation routes, the new research facility was intended to be relatively secluded.

“They didn’t want a lot of foot traffic, but they did want some sense of connection to the campus,” said architect John Ruble, who, with partner Moore, played a key role in the design. “It’s a building where a few initiated people work long hours. Any laboratory building is a controlled environment. The air is conditioned and filtered, and the work can involve toxic stuff. They didn’t want uncontrolled access.”

Unit II, situated on a prominent site near the southern entrance on Gilman Drive, was artfully grafted to 3-year-old Unit I, a stark concrete-block structure designed by San Diego architect Leonard Veitzer.

Why does this new building succeed where its peers on campus fail?

Mainly because its designers knew where to add flourishes and where to play their hand close to the vest.

The facade facing Gilman Drive, made of steel, glass and concrete, is neither overtly busy, like the Price Center, nor awkwardly composed, like the massive new concrete Engineering Building Unit I designed by San Diego architects BSHA.

Materials in muted grays and greens, combined with the subtle mound of earth between the building and Gilman, help the structure recede behind a screen of eucalyptus trees.

The real drama is saved for the other facade. Here, terraces detailed by Ferrara from Spurlock’s original landscape plan flank main entry steps that lead to a dramatic courtyard detailed by Moore.

Essentially, the building consists of two wings of laboratories on three levels, joined by the architects’ entry plaza and Ferrara’s terraces.

Screened by low walls of concrete block, the terraces are intended for the scientists who work in the building, not for the campus community at large.

Consisting of angular slate paths set in gravel, punctuated by lines of Australian willows, the terraces make a striking, somber statement, though even Ferrara is not sure what emotions she hoped to convey.

“I met some of the scientists, and came away with a notion about a stone garden,” Ferrara said. “I consistently try to do work that is non-referential, so that it will tend to have timeless connotations, like Stonehenge or the pyramids.”

Ferrara modeled the shapes of her two terraces on the footprints of the wings they parallel.

Moore designed the curved entry steps between the terraces. Ferrara had proposed angular steps, but the curved forms are better. They serve as a sort of animated hinge between the terraces.

For now, the entry to Unit I, directly connected to sidewalks, offers the easiest pedestrian access to the complex.

Although Ferrara didn’t see the architects’ design before she did her work, there is a surprising continuity of mood between the terraces and the courtyard: primitive and monumental.

Inlaid granite gives richness to weighty concrete-block walls around the entry court. Smooth plaster is sculpted into a variety of classically influenced forms, such as large pilasters on the main entry tower and courtyard columns topped with angular Pharaoh’s heads.

Curved and straight concrete benches in the courtyard form a yin-yang sort of ensemble in front of a fountain beneath an arch. A shading trellis of thick wood beams rests atop massive plaster columns.

Inside, the architects gave the labs a sense of openness reminiscent of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, barely a mile away. Natural light comes from large banks of conventional and clerestory windows.

The building, now partly occupied, opens officially in June.

Meanwhile, Ferrara, clearly a perfectionist, isn’t done. For one thing, she doesn’t like the “elephant trunk” shapes of the stair railings near her terraces. These will be altered or replaced, she said.

Also, the school is trying to find money for 15 teak benches designed by Ferrara for the terraces, Beebe said. These would make the expanses of gravel and slate more user-friendly.

Ferrara’s successful collaboration with Moore Rubell Yudell and The Spurlock Office proves that involving an artist early in the design process can produce art more subtle and innovative than the plop-art afterthoughts bolted to so many concrete pads outside other buildings.

DESIGN NOTES: San Diego architect Lee Platt died Saturday after brain surgery. Platt, 40, had won several awards for his work. Most recently, he completed designs for a recreation center in Rancho Penasquitos and the Maritime Museum in Old Town. Platt’s late father, Robert, was also a local architect. Platt is survived by a daughter Emily, 2, and wife, Chica, an architect who will take over as president of Platt Architects. Services will be held at 10 a.m. today at Glen Abbey Memorial Park. Donations can be made to Mercy Hospital and the Cancer Foundation.

Last week’s column on the new Uptown District project in Hillcrest should have credited Lorimer-Case Architects for all residential and commercial design on the portion of the development east of Vermont Street.