The Mark of Meier Will Make UCLA Arts Center Very Visual

Richard Meier, the renowned New York-based architect of the lofty $1-billion Getty Center in Brentwood, is shaking up the city’s cultural landscape again.

UCLA has announced that it has hired Meier & Partners to design a new visual arts building on the site of the current Dickson Art Center, which was damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Re-christened the Edythe and Eli Broad Art Center, the project--with a total cost of $40 million--will be paid for in part by a $20-million gift by the philanthropic couple. An additional $6 million will come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the rest from university funds. The new building will house painting, sculpture and ceramics studios for art students, as well as a gallery, library and cafe.

Meier is known for his almost fetishistic refinement of the classical Modernist idiom. Along with the Getty Center, his local projects include the Museum of Television and Radio, the Gagosian Gallery and, most recently, an addition to a house for the art collector Gil Friesen. The best of them, clad in his famous white panels, have the cool, hard-edged beauty of a well-cut jewel.

But art schools are places of creative spontaneity, not Utopian order. So what’s surprising is how well Meier has been able to adapt his rigid aesthetic formula to the needs of an institution that is more about process than perfection. One of Meier’s least fussy designs, its block-like concrete forms--pierced by a long ramp--hark back to an early Modernist obsession with the machine. Although the design is still in preliminary stages, it eventually may stand as one of Meier’s best institutional works.

To a large extent, the design is limited by the requirements of the site. In order to hold costs down, the project is, in fact, an extensive renovation, not a ground-up building. The basic layout of the original art center had to be preserved, as well as most of the original structural frame. Designed in 1965 by William Pereira, then one of the city’s most prominent architects, the center is essentially a courtyard scheme with an eight-story tower perched along one side. Nearby, a separate, two-story structure houses the school’s Wight Gallery.

The complex had a certain proportional elegance. But, in relation to its context, it was a dud. The entry to the courtyard--which faces a key pedestrian thoroughfare that extends one-third of a mile to the fountain in front of Franz Hall--is small and uninviting, while the courtyard itself is a cramped, lifeless space, often cluttered with an overflow of student work. Moreover, the courtyard block backs up against a massive retaining wall, with parking located out of reach 18 feet above on Charles E. Young Drive.

Meier’s big gesture is to break open the courtyard, extending that main pedestrian axis. In this configuration, the art center is divided into two parallel structures, one short and one long, with the tower forming a bridge across an expanded portal to the new courtyard. At the back of the courtyard, meanwhile, classrooms have been replaced by a series of stepped terraces leading up to Charles E. Young Drive. A long, narrow ramp runs from the front of the building, through the portal to the drive, further reinforcing the connection between upper and lower levels.

To those who know their Modernist history, the strategy is a familiar one. Meier’s inspiration is clearly Le Corbusier’s 1959 design for Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, also a center for visual arts. There, an S-shaped ramp pierces the building, linking two local streets and evoking a clash between the contemplative nature of art and the turbulence of outside realities. But the Carpenter Center’s ramp was largely a conceit. Although it offers a mesmerizing walk through the core of the building, it had no clear function, because the two streets it connected were barely traveled.

By comparison, Meier’s ramp is a logical, even blunt, reaction to an existing condition--reinforcing the natural pathways through the UCLA campus. What’s more, by extending the existing axis through the building, the architect creates a more intimate link between the art school and the rest of the university, both visually and conceptually. From the courtyard, for instance, the portal becomes a frame allowing students to orient themselves within the larger campus. (Unfortunately, the view is now partially obscured by the landscaping around Bunche Hall.)

An Intimate Cafe and a Public Plaza

Meier’s other major urban gesture was to set a new cafe on one side of the courtyard entry. The cafe’s curved facade funnels people into the courtyard, another Corbusian trick. But it also serves as an anchor for a larger public plaza in front of the building. An expanded Wight Gallery and library line the other side of the plaza. Together, the plaza and courtyard form a hierarchy of increasingly intimate public rooms.

Those themes--of communal interaction and functionalist efficiency--resurface in the design of the tower, which will house the students’ studios. To allow for open, loft-like rooms, Meier pulled all of the building’s services to the outside. A series of buttresses--shaped like long vertical blades--brace the exterior of the building on one side, eliminating the need for additional structural walls inside. Instead of interior corridors, six levels of walkways run along the exterior of the building, cantilevered above the plaza.

The walkways are a key element of the design. They should become gathering places where students can loiter and exchange ideas. At one end, each walkway is punctuated with a small outdoor meeting room where more formal exchanges can take place.

These are the kind of communal elements found in the housing projects of the Soviet avant-garde during the 1920s. But Meier adds a poetic detail. The walkways are enclosed behind rows of wide horizontal louvers. The width of the louvers means that the student’s gaze will be focused on the distant view, not on the bustling activity in the plaza below.

As for the studios--the crux of the design--they have yet to be fully developed. There are positive signs. The open-floor plan allows for an amazing degree of flexibility. And each floor has huge windows along the north and south facades--a predictable Meier feature--flooding them with natural light. But the windows also mean that there is little usable wall space. And among Meier’s next tasks will be devising a series of sliding or pivoting panels that students can use to adjust both the light and the wall space. Whether these panels work will go a long way in determining the ultimate success of the building as a place to make art.

As architecture, though, the building is a breakthrough, or at least a free-spirited trip down memory lane. The design marks a return to the architect’s Modernist roots. With the trademark white forms gone, replaced by the more conventional aluminum panels and raw concrete, the effect will most likely be a tougher, less finicky design. And that should be a relief to students, whose creative juices are more apt to flow in an atmosphere of playful discovery than one of divine reverence.