USC Face-Lift to Include Grand Entry

The University of Southern California began constructing last week a $36-million front door--a collection of buildings and grassy quadrangles leading to a ceremonial campus entrance on Exposition Boulevard.

The ambitious project requires the moving later this month of Widney Alumni House, the oldest university building in Southern California, for the third time in its 117-year history. The plan includes the construction of two major academic buildings and a pair of covered walkways from what will be a freeway-convenient entry on USC’s southeast edge.

“When you come to the campus now, you have no sense of arrival,” said Thomas H. Moran, USC’s vice president for business affairs. “So we wanted to have an entrance that gave people a real sense of arriving here and knowing that they were at the University of Southern California.”

The plan acknowledges that most people drive to the 154-acre campus south of downtown Los Angeles via the Harbor Freeway. Many first-time visitors are befuddled when they exit the Harbor and then make illegal left turns on Figueroa Street into the campus or continue to circle the university. The new entrance, marked by 24-foot-high brick archways and possibly a grand fountain, is intended to avoid such confusion.

To be located across from the Aerospace Museum, the gate is being designed to improve connections with the museums and the Coliseum in Exposition Park to the south. USC long has had an ambivalent relationship with the park and surrounding low-income areas, especially since the 1992 riots. So the entry is supposed to symbolize an opening to those districts, although a wrought iron gate will be installed so it can be closed and locked.

Some universities like Stanford, UC Berkeley and Columbia have stately formal entrances that help put visitors in a school mood, according to Thomas A. Gaines, a national expert on campus architecture. But most schools, like USC, have nothing more inspiring than a security kiosk.

Gaines praised the USC effort and predicted that it would boost recruiting both for students and alumni donations. “The more visual symbols, the more people like the campus and the more willing they are to give money later on,” said Gaines, who is the author of the 1991 book “The Campus as a Work of Art” (Praeger Publishers). The Tommy Trojan statue and the Bovard Administration Building give USC a sentimental center even if other parts of the campus seem unfocused, he added.

Over the years, USC has changed from an urban-style campus crossed by city streets to a more closed and pedestrian-oriented setting. Hastening that trend, the remnant of Hoover Boulevard that slices USC on a diagonal will be replaced with a series of park-like quadrangles during a second phase of the construction.

“It won’t have a football field or a baseball field. But it will be open for recreation so you can throw a football, throw a Frisbee and do all that kind of stuff on it,” Moran said.

Because the $6 million needed for the Hoover work has not been raised, that part of the project may not begin until January 1999, Moran said. By then, the gate and two new buildings are expected to be finished. The necessary $30 million in donations have been gathered for the entrance as well as for Popovich Hall, which will house the master’s program in business administration, and for Lewis Hall, which will be headquarters for the School of Urban Planning and Development.

On July 26, Alumni House will be moved on rolling dollies about 40 yards across Childs Way and a bit to the east, according to project manager Jay Simons in USC’s planning, design and construction department. At its new spot, the two-story, wood-frame building will be directly in line with the new campus entry, at the head of the driveway and walkways. Lewis Hall will take its current site.

Built in 1880, Alumni Hall was moved around campus in 1929 and 1955 without any major damage. Simons is so optimistic the building will travel well this time that the alumni office is planning to reopen in mid-September. Some alumni are planning a celebration on the moving day.

Like UCLA and many other American universities, USC has a lovely core of older buildings hidden by younger and less pleasant structures, said Michael Dennis, the Boston-based urban designer who wrote the guiding plan for USC’s face-lift. In the post-World War II era, he said, USC “built tons and tons of buildings, each one more awful than the last. It was just a jumble, a collection of odd, goofy buildings. Thank God for the landscaping. If it weren’t for the tropical paradise, it wouldn’t hang together.”

The new construction, particularly the new parks, will attempt to remedy those faults and extend some of the grace of the older sections, Dennis said.

The new buildings and the 260-foot-long pedestrian loggias of archways are being designed to recall some features of USC’s historic structures. Those elements include brick-and-stone exteriors and clay-tile roofs.

USC’s current main entrance, on Figueroa Street across from the Crown Plaza hotel, will be permanently closed when the new gate opens. The seven other gateways will remain open, particularly because many students live and shop north of Jefferson Boulevard and are not expected to use the ceremonial gateway much. In fact, the new entrance won’t connect to any multilevel garage, only to the limited open-air parking on Childs Way.

“A ceremonial entrance like this is more important for people who are arriving on the campus to do business, or coming for the first time, or who are guests of the university,” Moran said.

Across town, UCLA finished its gateway project in 1991.

Although it is hard to imagine now, the Westwood campus used to have its main entrance on its eastern side on Hilgard Avenue in an axis from Royce Hall and Powell Library. But freeway construction to the west and development of Westwood Village to the south shifted focus to the intersection of Westwood Boulevard and Le Conte Avenue.

That Westwood Boulevard entrance had been marked by an undramatic chain-link fence and some ivy plants. A $3.7-million overhaul replaced that with brick walls, ceremonial planters, seating areas, a fountain, widened sidewalks and dramatic plantings of palm and ficus trees.

More imposing ideas, such as an archway or small towers, were discussed, said UCLA campus architect Charles Oakley. But UCLA officials decided to create something that would signify a switch from the shopping district to the greener campus. “The preferred sense of how we presented ourselves had to do with landscaping,” Oakley said. “When you walk under the trees, you have a more gracious sense. You feel you have moved from a nice city street to quite a different environment.”

Oakley had kind words for the plans of the cross-town rival. “‘I think it’s nice, depending on how it’s carried out,” he said. It will give visitors to USC a better “sense of both where you are on the campus and its connection to the public realm of the parks to the south.”