Revival for UCLA arts buildings

UCLA’s Women’s Gymnasium was one of the Westwood campus’ original eight structures, with a beautiful red-brick Italianate exterior that included a striking rose window. But as the years wore on, water damaged its brick and terra cotta, and campus wags compared the first-floor locker room to a women’s prison.

As the university grew around it, the building’s lack of an inviting rear facade, or even entrance, made it seem closed off, as if it had turned its back on the campus.

Now the gym is about to reopen as Glorya Kaufman Hall, a state-of-the-art dance theater and the first of two old structures the university is radically reshaping to serve as arts facilities. The second one, to be renamed the Edythe L. and Eli Broad Center, will open in fall 2005 as a visual arts building. The two openings will bracket the UCLA Year of the Arts, the university’s largely symbolic designation for an academic year in which it will highlight and expand its cultural offerings.

Both structures are designed primarily for students and university staff, but each has something to offer the arts-going public as well.

Kaufman, the $35-million gym renovation, and the $50-million Broad Center, an adaptive reuse of an inelegant 1952 modern structure called Dickson Art Center, are being completed during a period of significant cutbacks by the University of California system. (UC has cut UCLA’s funding by $55 million over the last two years, and UCLA, which has an annual budget of $3.1 billion, has trimmed its arts budget by more than 8% during that period.) The funds for the projects came, instead, from the namesake donors and from federal and state money the university received to retrofit buildings after the Northridge earthquake.

Both Dickson and the Women’s Gymnasium -- which later became the dance building -- had their strong points. But both needed work, and neither interior exactly stirred the creative juices during their decades of use by students and faculty.

Before Dickson’s gutting, says Christopher Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, the hall was “like a rabbit warren of little dark spaces” -- a reasonable setting for offices but not ideal “for painting students or people working with digital projection.”

Transformed as the Broad Center, the building’s upper floors will be loft-like spaces flooded with natural light that can be filtered with teak louvers; its views already resemble the Getty Center’s.

“That’s a knockout!” the boyish Waterman says, gazing from the eighth floor across culture-centric North Campus on a recent hard-hat tour. “On a clear day you can see all the way to Santa Monica.”

And even on a cloudy day, you’ll be able to see a 42.5-ton Richard Serra sculpture, part of his “Torqued Ellipse” series, that will be unveiled next fall along with Broad Center itself.

Excepting the view, it’s difficult to get much of a sense of the Broad building now, with so much work yet to be done. Supported by a $23.2-million donation from the businessman and his wife, and designed by Richard Meier and Partners, it will house the departments of art and design / media arts, as well as the dean’s and other university offices. The first floor will include a 6,100-square-foot gallery to display work by students and a faculty that includes Chris Burden, John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray and Nancy Rubins. (This celebrated crew, oddly, has never exhibited together on campus because of the lack of an appropriate space, a university spokesman said.) Under the building will be the subterranean Experimental Digital Arts space, or EDA, designed for lectures and short-term events and installations, streamed live and many open to the public.

Kaufman Hall, named in appreciation for the philanthropist’s $18-million donation, which the university is calling the biggest ever to an American dance program, is another matter entirely. That building is nearly complete and will open to donors for a special event next month and to students and faculty in December; a public inaugural event will take place in March. It’s not hard to imagine it as the state-of-the-art dance and performance facility its planners envision.

There was some disagreement about the value of the original interior: In a planning conversation, director Peter Sellars spoke of the importance of honoring the “ghosts” of a building erected in 1932. Others considered it claustrophobic at best.

Either way, architect Buzz Yudell of Moore Ruble Yudell says he redesigned to engage both the past and future. The entire back of the building, for instance, was rebuilt, “sticking to the UCLA language of brick and terra cotta, but making it very contemporary,” as Yudell says, because the campus has opened up to make the building approachable from all four sides. (The firm also headed the restoration of the university’s historic Powell Library.)

Because Kaufman is part of the campus’ main drag -- near Royce Hall and the Fowler Art Museum -- it had to fit in smoothly. Yudell also worked to fit the structure to its tenant, the department of world arts and cultures, the eclectic program that includes dance and folklore and concerns the interplay of tradition and globalization.

“We were fascinated by the layers of the challenge,” Yudell says. “The ground floor was a low, dark range of columns; it was a locker room. With a historic building, we want to both respect it and transform it.”

Yudell, who, notwithstanding a dry Ivy League demeanor, studied dance as an architecture student at Yale, aimed to make the first floor and upper hallways “episodic,” with “choreographed moments” where spaces open up or where windows or balconies frame striking views of the campus. He also paid special attention to increasing natural light wherever possible.

One of the first floor’s highlights is a new central rotunda, which appears after passing under gently curving ceilings. Because the hall’s origins are Romanesque, it’s built around crosses and straight lines.

But Yudell designed the rotunda like a mandala, to open up the space and reflect the department’s interest in non-Western cultures.

At the building’s rear is an outdoor pavilion theater. Low-tech and spare with a simple garden and exposed wood, Yudell calls it “one step beyond a treehouse.”

Waterman sees it as going from a dance pageant to the setting of a Javanese puppet show, or serving as “a very groovy classroom.”

Kaufman is generating the most excitement because of its dance studios, several of which take advantage of light from an adjacent loggia, and its 300-seat dance theater. The theater, a former basketball court, would be welcome even if it were simply a dedicated bare-bones dance space.

“There’s a real limit to rehearsal and performance space for dance,” says Mark Murphy, director of the Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater, who notes that in a recent festival of new work at REDCAT, three of the programs used rehearsal space at UCLA.

“And world arts and cultures has a tradition of very interesting artists in residence that don’t get the opportunity to perform. Maybe this will give them the chance to, along with students.”

Murphy also said he hopes outside arts groups will be able to rent the hall. “It’s an incredibly healthy addition to the dance scene.”

The theater also gives UCLA Live, which presents touring dance troupes such as Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Lyon Opera Ballet, a potential new venue.

The theater will be both high-tech and flexible, with video capability, two technical balconies, versatile lighting and raked seats that can sit at almost any relationship to the stage. Unlike many spaces that can accommodate a variety of art forms, this one was designed with dance firmly in mind.

Says Yudell: “It’s sort of trying for a balance between a high-tech expression with the warmth and intimacy of another kind of theater, with ochre light and lots of exposed wood. It reminds me of really elegant Japanese pavilions.”

The building also offers a traditional dance studio that could double as a small theater, in a room with a high vaulted ceiling and an Italianate rose window.

“It’s great for students to experience movement in all kinds of spaces,” Yudell says. “It’s not just six identical dance studios. That’s one of the great things about an old building -- all these complexities and variations you inherit.”