STANDING
ON A ROOFTOP PLAZA at UCSD's new Eleanor Roosevelt College campus,
architect Moshe Safdie gazed at a cluster of balloons flying 30
feet overhead. The bright multicolored orbs, pushed almost sideways
by a strong sea breeze, tugged madly at a single string tied to
a railing. As if deciding to take the balloons home, Safdie began
to furl the long tether around his broad hand.
Few in the crowd of well-wishers
at the campus's pre-opening celebration last August seemed to notice
the tanned man with a bushy white mustache in the act of either
claiming a festive prize for his grandchildren or removing a garish
party favor from his clean-lined work. But as Safdie drew the balloons
closer, the architect and his campus design seemed to be proving
that "the architecture of interaction" was off to a good
and lively start.
Since his breakthrough
design for Habitat, the famed stacked-cube apartments at Montreal
Expo 1967 built when Safdie was in his 20s, the architect has championed
his theories of creating vital urban spaces. Now he is head of a
Boston firm with 65 architects and five full-time model makers working
from Safdie's concepts and sketches. He is celebrated for his designs
of the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, major public libraries
in Salt Lake City and Vancouver, the National Gallery of Canada
in Ottawa, and dozens of other acclaimed buildings and urban plans
around the world. His work is clean-lined but warm, especially in
its focus on communal spaces. He is obsessed with "finding
the truth, which is the complete opposite of freedom from rules."
Eleanor Roosevelt College
was Safdie's first opportunity to design an entire campus. It was
a challenge: The budget was tight for a 12-acre site (final cost
was $106 million). It had to house 1,240 students on a campus complete
with recreation areas, meeting and study areas, dining hall and
administrative offices. Most important, the college had to foster
a new sense of home after years of sharing facilities with other
colleges on campus. Since being created as UCSD's Fifth College
in 1988, it had never had its own dining hall. Students affectionately
called its aging, barrack-like residence halls "Camp Snoopy."
In the late 1990s, a new
ERC campus seemed a commission tailor-made for Safdie, the urbane
architect with a love of community vigor as well as academic rigor.
Safdie taught at Harvard for years, and ERC provost, Ann Craig,
recalls the great value the architect placed on "the role of
the colleges in the undergraduate experience here on campus."
Campus Architect M. Boone
Hellmann agreed. After a long screening and selection process mandated
by UC policy, the University's selection committee chose Safdie,
and Hellmann felt "we had an opportunity to create a new paradigm
for colleges."
Provost Craig, student leaders, Hellmann and others began giving
Safdie their input as he brought early designs to the table:
the program phase, in architectural parlance.
"Did ERC's program
shape the architecture?" asked Craig rhetorically as the sound
of cement trucks pouring the college's sidewalks roared outside
her new office last September. "Yes! Did architecture shape
the program? Yes!" For Craig and her ERC colleagues, this meant
finally moving into a cluster of buildings that lived up to the
college's promise of being a "close-knit community," one
in which "the global perspective begins at home," especially
by providing a home for the college's regular world-culture themes,
convocations, as well as living quarters for most of its first-
and second-year students. Craig refers to ERC life as an "international
menu," one that includes the University's longest core course:
six quarters of a rigorous academic challenge known as "The
Making of the Modern World."
The first hurdle was a
high one. UCSD's campuswide master plan originally called for five
clumps of buildings at ERC, each around a courtyard, on a sloping
site. A massive parking garage was also required, and original plans
showed it rising several stories above ground level.
"But I felt that
[the college] cannot be five places as opposed to one place,"
Safdie recalled during a post-construction lecture last October
at UCSD. "You must take the public spaces defined in the program
. . . and just like the ancient plans of every Greek city, plug
them into the main public paths of the college. They cannot just
be anywhere. They have to sustain and animate the life within the
college. And the way to do that is to have an extremely prominent
path of movement."
Safdie believes there
is a strong connection between movement and place of assembly. It
led him and his design team, which included his daughter Taal Safdie
and son-in-law, Ricardo Rabines, who have their own architecture
firm in San Diego, to conclude that there should be one very large
space. Safdie wanted a Common or Green "on the scale of spaces
like Harvard Yard; large enough that it can become ceremonial."
As the design evolved,
student council member Gloria Wang and other ERC students told planners
what they liked and didn't like about ERC's days in Camp Snoopy.
The Safdie team listened intently.
"It was the smallness
of the buildings and our own little lounges that drew us together,"
Wang, now in newspaper publishing, said. "It was something
unique about Roosevelt. And the huge lawn at Camp Snoopy, where
people would go to nap, study, play volleyball. The biggest obstacle
was not having our own dining facility." During design review,
Wang and other students were consulted on many matters such as the
location of the main Green, restrooms, paths and lounges.
"They did redesign,"
she said. "We saw changes."
The finished design for
Eleanor Roosevelt College shows a remarkable variety of buildings
and spaces, indoors and out. They may seem quite dense but none
is over four stories and all welcome sunlight and fresh breezes.
Housing is always adjacent to larger neighboring areas such as main
promenades, rooftop plazas, The Green and the amphitheatre-like
steps of Cafe Ventanas. The density reminds Taal Safdie and Rabines
of a "Mediterranean village," full of places where informal
interaction can occur.
"The experience of
the promenade between the provost's office and the Great Hall,"
said Rabines as he bent over the plan in his San Diego office, "is
very different from a streetscape with cars. This is where tension
and the closeness of the buildings comes into play. It's a canyon
feeling: tight and very cozy. Fun! Completely friendly. These are
not residual spaces left over after we designed the buildings, they
are designed spaces."
This promenade also passes
ERC's new International House, home to an all-colleges program with
240 spaces, half international and half U.S. students. The Great
Hall is intended to be International House's "living room":
a classic, large-but-comfortable space for casual meetings, conversation,
English tutoring, coffee, or a gathering of many residents for a
cultural-theme night.
ERC's main entry points
are at Ridge Walk on the northeast corner, and at Great Hall on
the south edge. Both the main promenade and The Green run north-south
to channel sunlight - not shadows"into most of the campus.
Connecting and cutting through these two main "canyons"
are a host of smaller east-west walks and mini-canyons between the
three main housing units. These units consist of residence halls
for freshmen (along the western edge), apartments for second-year
students and the International House apartments. These shared-apartment
living spaces include sizable common kitchens and living rooms.
A close look at the campus
reveals a curvaceous energy in both the buildings and open spaces.
Students going to and from their meals, meetings and rooms encounter
a number of surprises, especially as they walk along the main curve
running west from the Ridge Walk entry toward Cafe Ventanas.
"The curves did a
few things for us," says Taal Safdie. "They create movement,
both in the views and as you walk along. Curves make views change,
so things reveal themselves, but not immediately. As you come to
the end of the main curve at the west edge of Cafe Ventanas, for
example, it breaks away and ...your whole view is cut through a
little gap that looks toward the ocean. If the spaces had been rectangular,
they would have been much more static."
Construction costs were
a major challenge, and contractor Rudolph and Sletten, the design
team and the University went through rounds of painful "value
engineering" together. The dreadful euphemism means, simply,
"eliminate it." A planned pedestrian bridge over Scholars
Drive North, the one street with automobile traffic cutting through
the college, had to be erased. Metal framing gave way to conventional
wood or "stick" construction. Sidewalks textured with
thousands of European-style pavers became plain concrete.
"Now that we see
it finished," says Taal Safdie, "we're still pleased.
We don't dwell on what's missing."
"There is no fat,"
adds Rabines. "It is very, very lean."
Yet despite the compromises, ERC saved most of its signature details
and central design ideas, including metal sunshades, metal banding
set into the exterior stucco walls, the sinking of the 1,000-car
garage almost entirely below grade and extensive landscaping. Most
important, perhaps, ERC got its two great cornerstones: the soaring,
ribbed roofs and glass walls of the Great Hall and Cafe Ventanas,
each an unforgettable new landmark on campus.
"They're swooping," says Taal Safdie. "They're the
anchors of the public spaces - the outdoor streets and plazas. Their
shape comes from overlooking these spaces. We wanted them to feel
like they are opening up, looking onto open, outdoor rooms, like
big eyes. At the same time their shapes are very visible from afar,
so they work both ways."
"Moshe wanted their
shapes to contrast with the other ones on campus," adds Rabines.
"They carry on a theme of debate, liberalism, openness. The
shape is about light and gathering and celebration."
ERC also provided the
basic necessity of 1,240 beds, and its student quarters are as innovative
as the public areas. For first- and second-year students, Safdie
created small buildings where living groups of 11 have a rooftop
terrace or patio, easy access and a "living room" lounge
for the building. The lounge with its picture window is like a front
porch opening onto The Green. It encourages inter-group socializing,
drop-in friends and cooking together.
The names of the buildings
continue a tradition from ERC's Camp Snoopy, and reflect the college's
unique sense of community and international spirit: Mesa Verde Hall,
Geneva Hall, Kathmandu House, Cuzco House, Asante House, Oceania
Hall, several "Earth Halls," Middle Earth (a study lounge
and mail center), and a long string of freshman residences named
for the continents - Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and North
America.
The buildings are
energy efficient thanks in good part
to San Diego's benign climate. Hellmann tells the story of a student's
mother on move-in day asking housing director Mark Cunningham why
the air conditioner wasn't working even though she'd "turned
the dial up to five." Cunningham pointed to the window and
said, "That's your air conditioning - you're now in San Diego."
Summer or winter, UCSD's temperate coastal climate seldom requires
either cooling or heating, but when temperatures drop the residences
do have basic heating.
As move-in day drew near,
Cunningham and staff generated some of their own heat. The catch
phrase for the job became "All in?" This is a card-game
term Cunningham had seen on a televised poker tournament special
that means, "push all your chips to the center of the table."
The work pace rose to a frenzy. At 8:30 on the night before the
students arrived, the last concrete in front of a residence building
was poured. The beds were ready. Caution tape fluttered around several
common areas and worksites, but ERC's new campus was "all in"
and ready to welcome its students for their first night.
And what of Safdie's balloons?
Once he'd reeled them to his hand like a kite on a line, he let
them slowly out again. It would not be a repeat of the time in 1967,
when he tried to remove a pink-and-lime play sculpture in the Montreal
Habitat plaza. "Safdie sneaked onto the site in the middle
of the night and tried to roll it away," Larissa MacFarquhar
reported in The New Yorker, "but he was caught by security
guards. Even after Habitat was finished and Safdie had moved his
family into one of its apartments, he continued to patrol the building.
He would spot gold-anodized ashtrays in the lobby and try to get
them replaced with something more tasteful."
Safdie stepped back from
the railing near ERC's Great Hall and rejoined his daughter Taal,
son-in-law Ricardo and two grandchildren at a table
on the rooftop
plaza while the guests dispersed. UCSD catering crews were respectful
of Safdie's and the family's last reverie. An event
manager waited
until almost everyone else had gone home, then politely mentioned
that it was time to go. Safdie and his closest design
collaborators
rose and walked slowly through the new campus one more time before
their most important clients, the ERC students, would
claim the
campus as their new home. 
Peter Jensen is a freelance writer whose stories appear regularly
in Sunset, Coastal Living, and other magazines. He lives in
Del Mar.
|
