University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Why you should experience University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.

University of Southern California is a storied research university where University Park's collegiate character meets Romanesque Revival architecture, landscaped academic precincts and a campus that has grown alongside Los Angeles since the nineteenth century.

Set along Trousdale Parkway near Exposition Boulevard and just steps from Exposition Park, the university occupies a broad urban campus whose brick academic buildings, quadrangles and tree-lined pedestrian corridors form a distinct institutional district south of Downtown. Arcades, towers, tiled roofs and carved stone details define much of the historic core, with newer academic complexes extending the grounds through contemporary interpretations of the university's longstanding masonry character. Moving north through the campus carries the encounter across plazas and lawns framed by buildings of markedly different scales, from compact early structures to immense libraries, laboratories and professional schools. Formal axes create a second spatial dimension across the grounds, directing long views through courtyards and ceremonial spaces as dense planting softens the transition between successive architectural periods. The result is a university whose physical fabric makes Los Angeles' expansion from a nineteenth-century city into a global metropolis legible through more than a century of academic architecture.

What you should know about University of Southern California.

University of Southern California is best known for developing from a 53-student institution founded on the edge of nineteenth-century Los Angeles into a major private research university deeply connected with the city's growth. Judge Robert Maclay Widney organized the effort and formed a board of trustees in 1879, securing 308 lots from horticulturist Ozro W. Childs, former California governor John G. Downey and banker Isaias W. Hellman for the campus and its endowment. Nearly one-tenth of Los Angeles' population attended the cornerstone ceremony for the first university building on September 4, 1880, and USC opened on October 6 with 53 students and ten teachers at a time when the city lacked paved streets, electric lighting and telephones. Marion McKinley Bovard became the first president, presiding over early growth and severe financial instability before the university entered a sustained period of institutional expansion during the twentieth century. John Parkinson produced a campus plan in 1919 based on Beaux-Arts planning principles, organizing major buildings along University Avenue, now Trousdale Parkway, and giving USC a coherent architectural center as enrollment and academic programs expanded. Parkinson and his son Donald subsequently designed six campus buildings, using Romanesque Revival architecture to unite the formality of the plan with Mediterranean architectural traditions prevalent across Southern California. USC awarded Southern California's first Ph.D. in 1923 and developed pioneering professional programs during Rufus B. von KleinSmid's presidency, including the nation's first school of international relations in 1924 and an early public-administration school in 1929. World War II brought 50,000 participants through USC's Engineering Science and Management War Training program, the largest single-campus operation of its kind in the country. Postwar enrollment then surged from 8,500 students in 1945 to more than 24,000 in 1947 under the G.I. Bill, forcing another immense phase of land acquisition, construction and institutional growth.

Motion-picture education became one of USC's most consequential academic enterprises through a partnership forged directly with the emerging Hollywood industry. Douglas Fairbanks delivered the opening lecture for Introduction to Photoplay at Bovard Auditorium on February 6, 1929, launching a program developed with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only months before the first Academy Awards ceremony. Mary Pickford, Ernst Lubitsch, D. W. Griffith, Irving Thalberg, William C. DeMille and Darryl F. Zanuck belonged to the filmmakers and executives involved in the early instructional program, creating an unusually direct connection between university study and professional filmmaking. USC became the first American college or university to create a course of study leading to a bachelor's degree in cinema in 1932, and Richard Bare's The Oval Portrait emerged soon afterward as its first student film. The program moved into the former Architecture and Fine Arts Building in 1940 and developed new television coursework as broadcasting expanded after World War II. Introduction of inexpensive Super 8mm equipment in 1965 helped faculty develop the production course known as 480, where later filmmakers including George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis worked during their student years. Cinema became an independent school in 1983, and subsequent divisions extended instruction into animation, screenwriting, producing, interactive media and games. USC opened the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts in 2001 as the first university-based all-digital production facility devoted to cinema, television and interactive content. A new School of Cinematic Arts complex opened in 2009 around the George Lucas and Steven Spielberg buildings and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences courtyard, giving physical form to an academic relationship with Hollywood that began eighty years earlier.

How to fold University of Southern California into your trip.

University of Southern California works as the anchor for a University Park sequence tracing early university art patronage, nineteenth-century residential development and the preservation of Los Angeles architecture across the district surrounding the campus.

Begin at USC Fisher Museum of Art, founded through Elizabeth Holmes Fisher's gift to the university in 1937 and dedicated on November 14, 1939 as Los Angeles' first museum devoted exclusively to collecting and exhibiting fine art in its original purpose. Fisher also transferred a substantial portion of her personal collection, ultimately donating 74 paintings, drawings and sculptures through 1951, including Hudson River School and French Barbizon landscapes, British portraiture and Dutch and Flemish works. The institution's permanent home preserved her requirement that public admission remain free and later became one of the two museums incorporated into USC Museums in 2022. Continue to Stimson House, commissioned by lumber magnate Thomas Douglas Stimson and completed in 1891 from a design by architect Carroll H. Brown. Its Richardsonian Romanesque exterior combines red sandstone, rough masonry, arched openings and a corner tower within one of the most imposing surviving residences from the neighborhood's late-nineteenth-century development, and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet acquired the property in 1948. Conclude at Heritage Square Museum, created after rapid postwar redevelopment and freeway construction erased large numbers of Victorian-era buildings across Los Angeles. The Cultural Heritage Foundation established the museum in 1969 as a refuge for threatened structures, and surviving houses and civic buildings were relocated to the Arroyo Seco site to preserve examples of architecture spanning the city's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century growth. The collection includes the 1876 Palms-Southern Pacific Railroad Station, 1887 Valley Knudsen Garden Residence, 1888 John J. Ford House and 1899 William Hayes Perry Residence, placing domestic, transportation and commercial-era architecture within a single preserved precinct. The progression moves from a university museum created through private art patronage through a surviving mansion from University Park's residential expansion into an architectural collection assembled from buildings threatened across Los Angeles, tracing three forms of cultural preservation surrounding USC's own long physical development.

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