Why you should experience Royce Hall in Los Angeles, California.
Royce Hall is a commanding concert hall where Westwood's academic character meets Lombard Romanesque architecture, grand symmetry and nearly a century of performance and intellectual life at UCLA.
Set along Dickson Court near Portola Plaza and just steps from Powell Library, the concert hall occupies elevated ground at the historic center of UCLA's Westwood campus, positioned south of Sunset Boulevard between the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Angeles Basin, where the university's central axis descends toward Westwood Village and the metropolitan plain stretches toward Santa Monica Bay. Patterned brick, terra-cotta ornament and deeply recessed arches give the seven-story facade a visual weight intensified by twin asymmetrical towers rising above the central quad. Arcaded passages and cloister-like edges draw the surrounding campus into the composition, with the building's south-facing position placing its brickwork directly in the path of Southern California sunlight. The auditorium shifts that exterior scale inward through a broad proscenium, tiered seating and a coffered ceiling derived from the Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The result is a university building whose elevated siting, axial relationship to the historic campus, Italianate massing and theatrical interior give UCLA a physical center recognizable far beyond Westwood.
What you should know about Royce Hall.
Royce Hall is best known for anchoring UCLA's original Westwood campus through an architectural program conceived to give the rapidly growing university a permanent institutional center. Master planner George W. Kelham selected Lombard Romanesque as the architectural language for the new campus, favoring warm red brick for a Southern California setting that had been former grazing land before university construction began. Architect David Allison developed Royce as the largest of the four original buildings, drawing the twin-towered facade from the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan and using patterned brick and terra cotta over a reinforced-concrete structural frame. The building received the name of California-born philosopher Josiah Royce, a UC Berkeley graduate who became one of the earliest recipients of a philosophy doctorate from Johns Hopkins and later taught at Harvard. Royce and the facing library rose on opposing sides of a central axis, with Royce occupying higher ground to strengthen its dominance over the developing campus. UCLA marked its move west on May 31, 1929, when classes at the Vermont Avenue campus ended early and more than 500 automobiles and trucks carried students, faculty, books, furniture and laboratory equipment on a ten-mile procession to Westwood. Roughly 2,000 people arrived among the newly completed buildings, and hundreds of students continued moving university property during the summer before instruction began at the new campus. A Skinner pipe organ followed in 1930 after Della Mullock Mudd supplied $52,500 for an instrument transported from Boston through the Panama Canal and built with 5,122 pipes. Albert Einstein stood before a Royce audience in February 1932 and delivered a German-language lecture concerning the geometrical interpretation of gravitational and electrical fields, placing the young campus on an international intellectual stage only three years after its relocation. George and Ira Gershwin added another early chapter in September 1936 when they presented “Strike Up the Band for UCLA,” with George performing at the All-University Sing in Royce Hall before the song received a national radio broadcast days later.
The Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994 opened a separate architectural chapter when violent shaking brought the twin towers close to collapse, loosened exterior brickwork and severely weakened the auditorium shell. Structural damage forced the building to close and transformed an overdue seismic upgrade into a comprehensive reconstruction directed by Barton Phelps & Associates with Anshen + Allen Los Angeles. Royce's eligibility for the National Register brought FEMA resistance requirements exceeding ordinary life-safety thresholds, requiring the architects to strengthen the building. Engineers inserted a new structural system inside the existing fabric, with substantial concrete walls surrounding the auditorium and connections designed to make the new structure respond with the original masonry infill during seismic movement. The intervention added 30 million pounds of concrete and steel, nearly doubling the building's original weight. Reconstruction simultaneously created new performance-management facilities, study areas and university offices, replaced stage infrastructure and introduced variable acoustic technology into the auditorium. Federal disaster assistance supplied $36 million toward construction costs exceeding $68 million, placing the reco among UCLA's most substantial post-earthquake building projects. Royce reopened in April 1998, four years after the earthquake, and a reopening celebration assembled Carol Burnett, James Galway, Don Henley, John Lithgow, Sidney Poitier and Paul Simon. The completed work received honors from the California Preservation Foundation, Los Angeles Conservancy, Los Angeles Business Council and United States Institute for Theatre Technology, giving the earthquake reconstruction an architectural significance independent of the 1929 building it saved.
How to fold Royce Hall into your trip.
Royce Hall works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a university chancellor's outdoor art project, a private collection transformed into a UCLA museum and a 1929 clubhouse reborn as a major Los Angeles theater.
Begin at Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, where Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy turned a dusty gravel parking area on UCLA's north campus into five acres devoted to modern sculpture. Murphy worked with campus landscape architect Ralph D. Cornell on rolling lawns, textured paths, a formal brick plaza and a triple row of South African coral trees, with the completed garden dedicated in 1967. Its collection grew decisively after David Bright's death in 1965, when Murphy arranged an exchange with Bright's widow that brought works by Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore to UCLA. More than 70 works now occupy the grounds, including sculpture by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miró, David Smith and Henri Matisse. Continue to Hammer Museum, which opened in November 1990 around the collection of industrialist Armand Hammer in a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and financed by Occidental Petroleum. Hammer died three weeks after the opening, leaving portions of the museum unfinished, and negotiations with UCLA began in 1992 before the university assumed management. Hammer had assembled the collection's core between 1965 and 1990, bringing together European and American art extending from Renaissance painting through nineteenth-century French work. Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Degas and Gauguin belong to those holdings, and the museum's wider collections now exceed 50,000 objects. Conclude at Geffen Playhouse, housed in one of Westwood's earliest buildings, constructed in 1929 as a Masonic clubhouse serving UCLA students and alumni. The Masons retained it for nearly four decades before Donald and Kirsten Combs acquired the property during the early 1970s, restored architectural elements including its courtyard and tiled fountain and created the Westwood Playhouse alongside their furniture business and a restaurant. The Combs family donated the theater to UCLA in 1994 on the condition that theatrical use continue permanently, placing UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television founder Gilbert Cates at the center of its subsequent development. The company opened in 1995 and took the Geffen name in recognition of David Geffen's founding contribution, extending a building conceived during Westwood's formative years into a professional theater associated with UCLA. The progression moves from Franklin D. Murphy's conversion of university ground into an outdoor modern-art collection through Armand Hammer's private collecting and culminates in Geffen Playhouse's passage from collegiate clubhouse to professional theater, tracing three distinct ways cultural institutions became embedded in Westwood.
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