STYLE : ARCHITECTURE : One for the Books

UCLA has just made learning a great deal more fun. At the new temporary Powell Library (or “Towell,” as it’s been dubbed), you can study Shakespeare or Einstein or Nietzsche inside a gold-and-blue tent bathed in ethereal light. But don’t dawdle: The spaceship-like fixture has spread its wings at the bottom of Janss Steps for only the next five years.

Behind this bit of serious exuberance is the Santa Monica architectural design firm of Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, who were assisted by associate Lynn Batsch. Charles Warner Oakley, the campus architect, called them in to design a temporary home for the main library, which is about to undergo renovations to protect against future earthquakes.

Because the interim structure had to be designed and built quickly and on a budget of $2.8 million, Fung says, she and Hodgetts felt “liberated from the constraints of having to make a grand building.” Instead, they made a hangar for books, and then had fun with the shapes they packed around the sloped roof. They housed the library administrators in a long tube that is bent at either end to accommodate existing trees and to wink at students approaching from Westwood Plaza. The main reading rooms are circular and semicircular areas that use aluminum-ribbed versions of Gothic fan vaults to create sacred-seeming spaces out of “low-tech, temporary, off-the-shelf stuff,” Hodgetts says. These strange shapes present themselves at eye level with corrugated metal “masks” that he says “are remnants of what we thought of as temporary trailers pulled up to the tents.”

All of Towell is made of industrial materials. The so-called tent is a woven polyester, vinyl and polyurethane skin that is more typically found stretched over tennis courts, waste-disposal sites or large weddings. The base is brick-colored concrete block. Floors are concrete, wood or linoleum, and window panes are a plastic called Lexan. In their desire to use cheap and reusable components, the architects also designed 12 air-conditioning units, each one defining a space and leading visitors along the paths they delineate overhead. (When Towell is torn down, these machines can be placed in other buildings.)

If the architectural vision seems a bit rough and tumble, the effect is one of simplicity, strength and openness. Light washes through the translucent parts, and space appears to expand all around. “The whole building feels like an open book,” says one librarian.

“This building doesn’t exactly look normal,” Fung concedes, “but we knew whatever we did on this site and with this budget would look as if it landed from Mars. So we decided we might as well run with it.” This particular spaceship is spacey and spacious, an otherworldly machine that shelters one of the most serene spaces in Los Angeles.