Choosing Function Over Flash : Campus: Cal State San Marcos puts the accent on unity rather than opt for several different architects’ statements.

The new Cal State San Marcos campus probably won’t make the covers of cutting-edge design magazines, but it does establish a strong sense of place that is missing at San Diego’s two other major universities.

Set back against the low, desert-like hills south of California 78 near the Twin Oaks Valley Road exit, the 304-acre campus’ first buildings, where classes begin Aug. 31, looks like a latter-day version of some ancient Mediterranean hill town. Towers, arches, deep-set square windows and pale earth-toned stucco walls cut strong profiles in light and shadow.

A master plan by CRSS Architects of Los Angeles organizes buildings designed by CRSS and Architects Mosher/Drew/Watson/Ferguson of San Diego around plazas and courtyards. The plan ties the whole package together with boldly demarcated building entrances and a simple, easy-to-follow system of automobile roads and pedestrian paths clearly defined by landscaping.

The new campus has the potential to become a much more hospitable place than either UC San Diego, with its incoherent plan and jumble of newer grandstanding buildings, or San Diego State University, also poorly master-planned, where romantic old buildings are overshadowed by some awful, elephantine state-designed buildings from the 1960s.

Earlier this week, Al Amado, Cal State San Marcos’ assistant vice president for architecture and construction, strolled the new campus as workers added finishing touches, and hot winds swirled construction dust. He explained why he and university officials decided to take a conservative architectural approach they believe will lead to a unified campus.

For such a sizable job--the first four structures cost a total of $60 million--Amado could have attracted any number of celebrity architects. Instead, he went with proven firms that have reputations for solid, middle-of-the-road design and strong construction management capabilities.

The largest of the buildings, the 146,000-square-foot William D. Craven Hall, was designed by CRSS and won’t be ready until November, too late for the fall term. Amado hired San Diego Mosher/Drew to design the other three buildings that open this month: a 32,200-square-foot, three-story Science Hall; a 28,500-square-foot, two-level Commons, which includes a cafeteria and bookstore, and a 59,200-square-foot, four-floor Academic Hall, full of classrooms and lecture halls.

“I had worked for Mosher/Drew 15 years ago,” said the low-key Amado, 45, who earned his architecture degree from the University of Arizona and admires the austere modern buildings of the late Mexican architect Luis Barragan. “They have a philosophy of very clean architecture, a Bauhaus mentality.

“Bill Ferguson (one of the partners) is very details-oriented. The new science building is very sophisticated. The exhaust and mechanical systems were horrendous to design, but Bill came through for me. He designed a very functional facility.”

Amado guided the architects through a cooperative design process. CRSS and Mosher/Drew worked with each other to make their buildings hang together through the use of related forms and materials. Amado served as design critic, pushing the architecture in the unified direction he had in mind.

“To me, that’s the biggest failure in designing groups of buildings,” Amado said. “Having a mishmash, having every architect try to do his or her own statement. When I interviewed the architects, I asked them how contextually responsive they would be.”

Design details suggested by Amado include larger windows on the Academic Hall that let in extra natural light and suit the scale of the building; smaller windows on the Science Hall, which maximize shelving space in rooms where natural light isn’t so important and can be a detriment to some experiments; and boldly defined entries on all buildings.

To make entrances easy to find, Amado splurged.

Soaring, arched openings that project out from the Academic Hall and Science Hall are framed in German marble, and the base and entry of nearby Craven Hall will match. While the budget wasn’t flush enough for expensive stone underfoot, concrete at entrances was textured to resemble blocks of stone.

The new buildings are arranged around a central “Founders Plaza” that features a colorful patterned terrazzo emblem designed by Graphic Solutions of San Diego, and orderly rows of crepe myrtle trees.

Wide sets of steps carry visitors up from parking lots to the ends of the central plaza.

The Commons, with its distinguishing tower and dining rotunda, and the Lecture building anchor the ends of the plaza, with Craven Hall and Science Hall running down the sides.

This plaza, the current heart of campus, will not be at the center if the university is completed as planned in 20 years or so. The temporary status of the present bookstore, in the Commons building, partially excuses its out-of-the-way location and hard-to-find entrance off an interior courtyard.

Eventually, a 135-foot bell tower will be added to the northeast of the present group of buildings, along with a library and student union that will establish a campus center. The planned new library, and a future performing arts building, may offer chances for some riskier architecture.

“I think the strength of the master plan could handle an architect like Frank Gehry,” said Bill Caskey, CRSS’ principal in charge of the San Marcos planning and design efforts. “But the character of the campus has been set by the campus architect (Amado), and he may not feel as comfortable with an architect like Gehry. We’d be asking him to do an interpretation of an Italian hill town. But the performing arts hall will be far enough from the main spine where something like that (a stronger architectural statement) could happen.”

While the new campus is the beneficiary of careful planning, it could have been even better if a little more money had been spent on materials.

Affordable stucco walls, through the use of carefully placed seams, are meant to resemble panels of stone. But while these seams help soften the impact of broad expanses of stucco, in some places, they come off as phony, as stucco masquerading as something it never will be.

And the building interiors have a predominantly institutional character, with floors of affordable vinyl tiles and a limited number of windows that don’t take advantage of the site’s spectacular views.

According to Amado, the hot, near-desert climate of San Marcos dictated air conditioned buildings and modest, inoperable windows that will help regulate interior temperatures. But it’s too bad students won’t be able to enjoy real fresh air in any of the new buildings.

For Amado, who was hired in 1987 to supervise the master planning of the new campus and the design of its buildings, the past year has brought some dreams to fruition, but not without a few nightmares.

In December, 1990, one of the project’s main contractors, Louetto Construction of Escondido, was replaced after failing to pay subcontractors. This snafu, and unexpected ground-water problems encountered during the construction of Craven Hall, set the completion of that building back several months. It won’t be finished until November, too late for the fall term.

Meanwhile, Amado has selected architects to design the next three campus buildings: two lecture halls and a lab.

Briefly, well-known Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, a disciple of Barragan’s, was in the running, but when he balked at being part of a design team, Amado decided to go with Gino Rossetti & Associates of Santa Monica. He sees the company as more progressive than Mosher/Drew or CRSS, but not quite as far out as Gehry and others.

Amado may be erring slightly on the conservative side, but that is better than going hog wild and creating a potpourri of buildings that don’t fit together at all. Anyway, good planning and inviting spaces between buildings are as important as the actual buildings. In both architecture and planning, CSSM is off to a solid, if safe, start.