The project is done and a review is in:
Disneyland meets Hogwarts at $700-million USC Village
"At a ceremony last week to mark the opening of the $700-million USC Village, C.L. Max Nikias, the university’s president, spoke at some length about the architecture of the new complex and what he called “USC’s extraordinary physical metamorphosis” in recent years.
He pointed out the similarities between the red-brick Village and USC’s 1930 Physical Education building, designed by John and Donald Parkinson. He praised the design of the 3-year-old Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, which like the Village was designed by the Los Angeles firm Harley Ellis Devereaux in the neo-traditional Collegiate Gothic style.
Then came his ringing conclusion: “And let’s always remember, the looks of the University Village give us 1,000 years of history we don’t have. Thank you, and fight on!”
Even delivered in a vacuum it would have been a remarkable statement: the president of the leading private university in Los Angeles taking up, as a rhetorical cudgel, one of the laziest clichés about the city, that it has no history to call its own.
At an event marking the opening of that president’s signature architectural initiative, though, it took on more shades of irony than Nikias probably realized.
It’s precisely the Village’s misreading of the architectural history of the USC campus — and the cultural history of Los Angeles — that leaves it looking so undernourished and out of place.
Despite its nostalgic trappings, this isn’t an architecture that remembers. It’s one that forgets.
The Village is the most ambitious of the building projects Nikias has overseen since taking up the USC presidency in 2010. The university describes it as “the biggest development in the history of South Los Angeles,” though the Coliseum might have a better claim on that title; Nikias called it “the most prized jewel in the crown of our campus.”
Covering 1.25-million square feet on a 15-acre site bounded by Jefferson Boulevard, McClintock Avenue and Hoover Street, it represents a major expansion of USC’s architectural footprint north of Jefferson and into the city at large. Along with residential suites for more than 2,500 students — a nearly 25% expansion of campus housing for undergraduates — its six five-story buildings hold a fitness center, classrooms, a dining hall and ground-floor retail spaces, open to the public, that include a Target and Trader Joe’s.
The completed Village suggests that however effective the thousand-years slogan might be as a fundraising pitch, it’s a shaky foundation for new architecture. With its Gothic ornament, peaked arches and 150-foot clock tower, the complex is a fantasia of just-add-water heritage, equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts.
Even more striking, the Village barely pretends to have the courage of its neo-trad convictions. Once you walk inside any of the buildings it becomes clear that the Gothic exterior is a stage set, a false front behind which lies a drearily conventional series of spaces."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...820-story.html
Unsurprising for a critic of LA architecture, but valid criticisms. It will be interesting to see how Yale's new campus contrasts with USC's.
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