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On University Campuses, It’s All About the Fit
by: Clarence D. Mamuyac, Jr., FAIA, LEED AP BD+C & Kim-Van Truong, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Assoc. DBIA
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
Just beyond the footprint of every project site, there is a world of context that our work can support and be supported by. Athletics
Education
Urban Planning
In our sessions with higher-education clients, we like to spend plenty of time on the principles of “campus fit.” Looking at a project through this lens helps us see the finer points of the campus plan and ties our work into the plan’s goals for circulation, architectural style, wayfinding, entry markers, and palettes for color and materials – all the factors that give a school its character.
Regardless of a project’s size or visibility, it is essential to draw robust and enduring connections. Every move must support the campus’ broader goals for aesthetics, functionality, infrastructure, and so on, while corroborating the site’s scale of density, whether urban, rural, suburban, or some combination.
When expanding athletics precincts or doing athletics renovation work, we draw again and again on the principles of campus fit. Three ELS projects of different vintage – at Stanford, USC, and UC Berkeley – have been seminal to our campus planning work since.
An aerial view of Stanford University from the athletics precinct, looking southwest.
Athletes in a Landscape
Starting decades ago, we began to expand the athletics precinct at Stanford University through a new master plan, in many cases carrying out that vision through later renovations to the school’s athletics facilities.
Being on Stanford’s campus is always a pleasure. It blends low- and mid-rise development of various complementary styles and eras with a vast natural portfolio of mature trees, extensive planted areas, and stunning views to the distant ridgeline. Here, the landscape is the frame for everything else – it’s like being surrounded by a national park. Walking the campus, it’s easy to find yourself in a designed visual event, but soon after, the oaks and redwoods again take over. Anything resembling a city feels far, far away.
For our initial master plan, the challenge was to create a home for the athletics department that respected Stanford’s unique feel while uniting its intercollegiate teams around a single brand and delivering that special excitement that defines an athletics precinct on game day. Every step needed to uphold the stature of a world-class university in the eyes of all visitors, from high-school recruits to alumni who graduated decades before.
Our solution started with the establishment of an outdoor hub for departmental events and pre- and post-game gatherings. Most recently known as Pac 12 Plaza, its rough equidistance to a range of sports facilities (the Avery Aquatic Center, Taube Tennis Stadium, Maples Pavilion, the track and field complex, the Sunken Diamond, Stanford Stadium, among others) quickly established it as the place to be on game and event day – and, as such, the center of Stanford Athletics.
Campuses often develop in ways that put athletic facilities at or near the school’s perimeter. That’s why, for all of our planning work at Stanford, we and our team (which included longtime collaborators SWA Group) were careful to establish or reinforce cues offered by the Main Quad, so that the athletics precinct felt like an extension of the academic core – as much a part of campus life as anywhere else. This meant respecting and continuing the connections of the Main Quad’s grid to the most prominent facilities and venues in the entire precinct, including Burnham Pavilion, the Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation, and the Ford Center for Sports and Recreation. Our work also benefited from perimeter fencing, with thoughtful detailing suggested by a prominent longtime donor, that further reinforces visual consistency and unifies the athletics region without dominating the landscape or creating a feeling of separation.
At Stanford University, our planning work allows for exciting views of the athletes at the Maas Diving Center, also designed by ELS.
Another way that we uphold campus fit is by designing venues, whenever possible, to maximize views to a space’s interior. This affords pedestrians the up-close experience of athletes training in an architecturally rich setting, giving the team a prominence resembling that of performers on a stage. For instance, at Stanford’s Avery Aquatic Center, right off the central hub, our design prioritized transparency and permitted casual onlookers to be amazed by the world-class richness of their surroundings, from the acrobatics of divers to the speed of swimmers. Our planning efforts set up opportunities for similar views of facilities for track and field, baseball, tennis, and beach volleyball.
In addition to transparency, we also reinforced moments of connection, linking our work to the campus color palette, landscaping, circulation, wayfinding, and more, all to sustain the school’s overall unity. Anyone designing at Stanford has plenty to work with, from terra cotta roof tiles and building facades in a golden, Tuscan hue to redwood bark and rust-colored dirt. In recent decades, Stanford’s officials have cleverly let color be a common denominator that lets the form run free. Some of the world’s top architects have been able to make extraordinary visual statements by working within a visual palette that tends to organize each structure into a cohesive whole. Especially on a campus with an extensive tradition of historically informed work, it’s refreshing to see buildings that no one has forced into resembling traditional architecture.
At Home in the City
In terms of their urbanization, the University of Southern California feels like the exact opposite of Stanford. Here, the city of Los Angeles doesn’t just surround the campus, it seeps into its porous borders and offers an urban intensity that, by virtue of the school’s careful deployment of historic architectural styles, lets the campus remain distinctly USC in feel.
Aerial view of USC’s athletics precinct, looking northeast. Victory Walk runs diagonally past the aquatics complex at center.
Early on during our renovation to what became the Uytengsu Aquatics Center, we were asked to help convert a service street into a main athletics precinct corridor, now known as Victory Walk and at the time as McClintock Avenue. We were tasking with integrating the school’s intercollegiate sports teams into a grand venue – a destination in its own right – with different sports lining each side of the street, among them our renovated aquatics center on the corridor’s western flank. Doing so linked up each of the various athletic units; we also connected the athletics precinct to the main pathway that runs east-west through campus. All of McClintock was turned into a thoroughfare for pedestrians and bikes, with deliveries restricted to certain hours.
Just as at Stanford, we prioritized the connection to USC’s broader landscape and brought athletics closer into the campus fold by respecting the school’s well established visual vocabulary. For our work on the aquatic center, this vocabulary helped us determine, for instance, which type and color of brick to use and which types of arch, shaping our work around the Collegiate Romanesque style that campus leaders were specifying at the time. Working this way squares with our general belief that athletics venues and districts must be seen as neither separate from or less than the rest of the campus but rather part of its lifeblood.
At USC’s Uytengsu Aquatics Center, transparent windows allow passersby to enjoy the sight of athletes training or in competition.
Establishing New Borders
In their porous connections to the cities that surround them, USC and UC Berkeley resemble one another. Yet UC Berkeley differs in that its athletics facilities are found in two precincts (Athletics East and Athletics West), placed at opposing southern corners and separated by a mile’s worth of campus development. This is in striking contrast to Stanford’s extensive property, where the athletics precinct has remained undivided and cohesive for decades.
Our work on Legends Aquatic Center at UC Berkeley extends the school’s athletics precinct to the west and the south. Edwards Memorial Stadium is at center left.
If the athletics precincts at UC Berkeley are defined by porosity and bifurcation, those qualities were compounded in the site identified for our Legends Aquatic Center. As a glance at a map of the site will show, the complex is a stone’s throw from some of Cal’s most iconic places, yet – given its placement on the south side of Bancroft Avenue – it is effectively off campus. Early on, it was easy to see how the site’s separateness would pose risks to the project. A visually noisy urban fabric could dilute or overwhelm our concept’s visual impact, and our facility might also be seen as “less than” the adjacent precinct or disconnected from vitality of the athletics venues found at the Athletics West precinct, just to the north.
For this work, it was essential, to make a new, off-campus aquatics center that would feel totally integral to Athletics West and its powerful athletics scene.
We first sought to establish visual connections across all scales by establishing a formal counterpart to the pageantry of Athletics East’s football stadium and additional venues up the hill. We worked with campus officials to align our work’s color palette and signage with the branded collateral that was created for the West precinct. We also listened to the campus itself in making various design cues connecting our work to Spieker Pool, located northwest across Bancroft, and to the grandeur of Edwards Memorial Stadium, directly across the street.
The stadium’s concrete pylons, as part of a finely detailed façade enclosing the historic venue, make a visual statement – in effect, “you have arrived at an important place for athletics” – that we were eager to share in and reciprocate through our work. That meant organizing the aquatic center’s plan to align with certain pylons, making their centerline dictate that of the pool and the dive tower.
This alignment is especially noticeable to divers perched on the tower’s upper deck, but even passersby at street level can see how the tower’s prominence adds to a sense of arrival by loftily announcing the programming that gives the university’s southwestern entrance its character. The height of the dive tower, coupled with its location at the site’s southern edge along Durant Street, effectively extends the precinct by a block and, as implied by Edwards Stadium, reminds people that the neighborhood is an important place for athletics.
Unusually for a university project, this center fell under the city’s South Side Plan, which led to a close collaboration with city officials who asked us to treat the venue in the same way we would treat a retail storefront. Naturally, we seized the opportunity to create a glazed, aperture-like entry. As at Stanford and USC, the transparent moment highlights the prowess of world-class athletes, all within a gleaming pool area. Creating a large void in the streetwall adds visual interest to the cityscape and counters the weight of the stadium’s concrete façade just opposite.
From the street, passersby have a direct view of the action at UC Berkeley’s Legends Aquatic Center.
Through design elements like this one, we corroborate broader goals for the campuses we work with. We’re grateful that, through contemporary trends, the athletic precinct is no longer considered secondary to the rest of campus but rather a place that, as one of the liveliest in the entire school, benefits everyone through integration and good planning.
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