The Rebirth of Royce Hall

Shaken, cracked and crippled by the Northridge earthquake four years ago, UCLA’s Royce Hall is about to be in service again. The 1929 Romanesque concert hall and classroom building--whose auditorium was quietly reopened Tuesday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and opens to the public on April 15--has been restored at a cost of $68.3 million, $36 million of which was paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The high degree of damage and the scale of the subsequent repairs allowed the university to also address two problems that have plagued the building for decades--the inferior acoustics of its concert hall and the clutter and misuse of the building’s classrooms and offices.

Surprise! All of these problems have been competently addressed. As should be expected, the building is now structurally more sound than ever before. Classrooms and lecture halls that once were stuffed with dreary cubicles and partitions have been restored to their original elegance. And much effort was made to give the concert hall the acoustic flexibility needed so that--for the first time in its nearly 70-year history--it can function adequately for both concerts and lectures. (The results of those acoustical fixes cannot be judged until the opening performance of the Philip Glass opera “Monster of Graces” in April.)

Designed in 1929 with a replica 12th century facade and vaguely 15th century interior details, Royce Hall’s cheery eclecticism was typical of California campus buildings of that time. The hall is a playful take on the Church of San Ambrogio in Milan, whose loose, elegant cluster of Romanesque forms were built over the course of two centuries. That structure’s forms are generously spaced, its towers charmingly uneven. At Royce, the composition of these elements is more two-dimensional. The facade is flatter, the towers--now of equal height--are distinguished only by their differently patterned surfaces. It is solid--not great--architecture.

The building’s value, however, stems less from its aesthetic appeal than from its place as a central element in the school’s original campus--a Beaux Arts scheme that grouped four Romanesque structures on either side of a central quad to create a mock Northern Italian hill town. Royce Hall is the central icon of UCLA’s campus and a key cultural beacon for the community at large. Because of this, its restoration marks a significant step in the preservation of our academic heritage.

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The damage was severe. The earthquake snapped the structural frames of the building’s towers in two. Much of the building’s exterior brick veneer broke loose. And the concert hall’s structural shell lost fully a third of its strength. To ensure that the building would survive another earthquake of equal magnitude unscathed, engineers decided to add 30 million pounds of concrete and steel to the building’s structure--almost doubling its original weight. And that raised a new problem: Where do you hide 30 million pounds of concrete without distorting the building’s form?

Aesthetically, the restoration was guided by caution. The architectural team responsible for the restoration, Barton Phelps & Associates with Anshen + Allen, Los Angeles, designed a system of shear walls--some 14 inches thick--that now encase the auditorium, essentially creating a massive concrete box. Both the building’s towers and the flanking classroom and office spaces lock snugly back into that main structural frame.

Once the additional structure was in place, the team was able to clear out much of the clutter that had accumulated over the years in the classroom and office areas. Study halls that had been crammed with cubicles for teaching assistants were cleared out. Hallway skylights were again opened up to the sky above. A graceful 2,800-square-foot lecture hall with a faux timber truss ceiling and arched windows will soon reopen as a humanities library. The canvas murals that cover the main loggia ceiling--painted by Julian Garnsey--have been restored. The result is a building that looks and feels lighter than it did in its earlier incarnation.

But the heart of the building is the concert hall itself. And there, much of the restoration effort was driven by a need to improve on the hall’s mediocre acoustics. Originally designed as an auditorium for lectures and student gatherings, by the late 1930s, Royce Hall had become an important venue for the performing arts. Acoustically, it was a flop. In the early 1980s, the university tried to address the hall’s acoustical problems during a $12-million restoration project. (The hall’s west foyer and terrace were built at that time to accommodate the hall’s expanded function and swelling local audiences.) The large curving coves that ran the length of the original ceiling were removed to lessen the possibility of disruptive echoes. But a new problem arose--music sounded better, but lectures and theater performances were nearly inaudible.

In the current version, the interior walls--once plaster--are now a geometric patchwork of stone and brick that functions to create more surface area for sound to bounce off, making the sound more lively. Above, large acoustical chambers--four on each side of the hall--vaguely mimic the hall’s original clerestory, which was bricked over during the 1984 restoration. The new system allows natural light into the hall during the day--a plus for sleepy students. More important, by opening and shutting the chambers’ massive doors and adjusting acoustical panels, the room’s reverberation can adapt better to speakers or orchestras, whose acoustical needs are opposite.

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The new look of the hall is a direct--if somewhat stylized--reflection of the acoustical tinkering. The variegated stone and brick give the hall a tougher look. The new clerestories create the illusion of exterior space alongside the hall while drawing the eye up to the room’s best feature--its ornate coffered ceiling, a copy of a 15th century design attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo, recast here in baby blue and gold--the school colors.

The effect is slightly spartan--we are not in the lush velvet boxes of La Fenice here--yet, all in all, the restoration is a clear success. The hall has a lightness it has never had before. With a little bit of luck, it will sound better than ever. And that will be a boon to both the school and its extended community.