ARCHITECTURE REVIEW : Restrained Elegance : At Sundown, UCI’s Functional Concrete Barclay Theatre Turns Seductive

Like a medical researcher who ends her workday by doffing her white lab coat and slipping into a black cocktail dress, the new Irvine Barclay Theatre at UC Irvine undergoes a seductive transformation when the sun goes down.

Clearly in its element at this hour, the building becomes structure as event, a commanding signal to both community and campus. It invites. For all the go-go action in the restaurant/club scene at the UCI Marketplace across the street, the theater is the new pulse of the area.

The building--near a footbridge spanning Campus Drive--beckons to both town and gown, on a site at the edge of UCI’s campus that was selected more than a decade ago to appeal to students and the community at large.

“The site had to be highly visible,” said Douglas Rankin, the theater director. “The building would not have been effective if it had been hidden somewhere in the interior of the campus. It had to be there to straddle both the school and community.”

The building is sheathed mainly in cast-in-place ribbed concrete. Its mass and boxy volumes aren’t taken in one gulp and are, therefore, less formidable than the original 1960s campus structures.

Dusk temporarily brings out the more alluring mauve hues of the concrete until dramatic night lighting yields icy washes of color ranging from cool white-gray to pink. The dark green glass, which dominates during the day, falls back into itself to minimize its harshness.

Even the exposed mechanical apparatus on the second-level roof line--jarring in daylight--lends intriguing shadows to the commanding evening presence. Lighting on the outside plaza is handled with a deft touch.

Essentially, there is a legibility to the building and its function not fully grasped before dark.

Seventeen years in the making, the facility sits comfortably amid surrounding architectural styles ranging from middle-of-the-road corporate to last-gasp postmodern kitsch.

With all the hoopla attending each architectural arrival to the UCI campus in the last decade, it is significant that the recent notice given to the Irvine Barclay Theatre has been primarily for its functional achievements.

“It was never about architecture with a big A,” said the theater’s architect, Larry Cannon. “Our basic task was to make a good performance hall. When it came down to architecture versus technical emphasis, we didn’t give in to whim.

“With all the mass we had to deal with, the buzzwords were restrained elegance, “ he said. “We sandblasted the concrete to bring out its character and give it a very fine texture. Even though it is concrete--and there is lots of it--we made it not crude.”

The color is apt: a compatible shade of sandstone blending the light neutrals of the campus with the more vibrant takes on neo-Mediterranean strewn throughout the marketplace.

The circulation plan starts at a small, recessed plaza at the forefront of the building and at the base of the bridge hub. Composed of an oddly unsophisticated patchwork color jumble of concrete brick, the limited expanse of paving extends the theater and marks its actual entrance.

The plaza cries for amenities. Conducive landscaping, seating, the basics.

These are expected to be provided as budgets permit. But if you’re going the no-frills route, why the rather gratuitous gestures such as the curlicue-pipe hand railings and the bronze donor plaques set in the ground?

For that matter, fewer mushroom-shaped lights dotting the exterior arcade would have saved a few cents and made for some visual relief.

The lobby too has a major problem: The color scheme of its facade is dark green glass, plus darker metallic-blue aluminum panels. The skin for the two-story lobby and upper gallery should be a counterpoint to the concrete surfaces of the rest of the building. Instead, its shading drags down the other materials and paints a far-too-serious face on what, after all, will be a fantasy world.

The city dwellers are used to this kind of applied severity to their buildings. But unless the message to the student body is that it’s a hard, cruel world out there, a warmer, lighter surface might have been used for the jutting form.

In defense of his choices, Cannon said that the green glass is necessary for controlling the heat on the south side of the building and that he went with as light a shade as possible. And for the panels, he’s nothing if not pro-blue.

Graceful touches can be found even where budget concerns held forth. The painted gypsum board for the foyer walls is honest and direct, making more sense here than most applied finishes would. The metal-strip ceiling has both acoustical deadening capacity and a nice way of throwing off warm light.

In the auditorium, Chen Hall, the design challenges were obviously more complex.

“The toughest thing was to fit the architecture to the geometry defined by the acoustician,” Cannon said.

Sight and sound requirements took care of the curve of the balcony, the angling of the walls and the height of the stage. Everything beyond the technical imperative was done, according to the architect, to provide warmth and intimacy.

The auditorium has 756 seats, the farthest out a cozy 60 feet from the proscenium arch. The full-quality professional stage is 40 feet deep and 80 feet wide. Acoustics can be regulated to favor either speech or music.

The real high point of the auditorium, whose primary purpose was to bring down the scale of the hall, is the nickel-plated meshing that loops low to foil large ceiling gaps.

The theater is dark--even when an event is planned. According to theater designer Paul Landry, the wall color--a dusky rose--was chosen because it is unobtrusive and doesn’t reflect light.

“The most important thing to happen in a theater is not the sidewalls but the event,” he said. “If the walls were all white, you’d never get rid of them.”

Curtain warmers and house light manipulation will resolve the matter of ambient color for each performance.

A quibble?

There’s just too much trim. All the molding--the applied half-round verticals and the classic egg-and-dart pattern--detract from the simple focus of the room. They seem superfluous. Except that maybe this was the only place the architect could play, given the many technical limits he faced.

As in any newly completed building, there are kinks to be worked out--minor imperfections for the most part indiscernible to the average theatergoing eye.

At a cost of $17.6 million for 55,000 square feet, the theater was expensive to build. As monetary constraints snipped and reduced amenities, so too must these be added when funding permits.

A planned second phase of construction will bring a smaller studio theater with separate lobby entrance to the southwest edge of the building. Management offices are also slated for that end at a later time.

As for the design of the theater in relation to other campus offerings of the past several years: “It was just one approach,” Cannon said.

“Architecturally,” he said, “UCI is a mixed bag. There are some very good buildings and some not good. Some are going to look like dinosaurs in a few years, and not at all withstand the test of time. We went for permanence and presence and rejected the trendy.”

No deliriously poetic exercise, the building is a dynamic and will have a long run in a pivotal role.