Sign up for email newsletters

Sign up for email newsletters

In the 1960s, UC Santa Cruz was on the search for architects of distinction. A number would have connections to other county projects. The proposed UCSC campus called for separate colleges of individualized styles. Each was clustered into a village unit. Originally conceived as a sprawling mass of new construction in the Great Meadow, landscape architect Thomas Church proposed moving the architecture into the timberline, so each college had its own sense of place. But this park-like setting posed the challenge of preserving the natural environment as much as possible.  Church hoped to avoid turning the forest into an asphalt jungle with an automobile under every redwood. How do you build with nature?

UCSC Chancellor Dean McHenry, felt trees should not be ornaments subservient to the architecture as in normal landscaping. The redwoods were architectural elements in themselves, a context against which the buildings would be judged. He wanted architects to incorporate most of the trees and natural terrain, rather than wall it off. McHenry proposed a height limit, never rising more than two-thirds the height of a mature redwood, to preserve “a humanness of scale,” and the framing qualities of the treeline. Lower buildings aided quick evacuation in an emergency. Electric and telephone lines were placed underground, for aesthetic reasons, and it now appears, fire safety. McHenry wouldn’t let a mature redwood be felled, unless he’d personally signed a release.

Henrik Bull designed the Whole Earth Restaurant in a redwood-stained building on telephone pole pilings, which looked like a tree-housing against the forest backdrop. But it was feared the traditional values of “building with nature” were doomed. David Kamen observed in the “Daily Californian” on March 1, 1966, that East Coast colleges tried to outdo each other with prestigious new architecture. But at the University of California, he feared new universities wanted to outdo each other on being the cheapest, competing for mediocrity. While McHenry appreciated cost savings, he wasn’t willing to cheat his vision of the quality he wanted, and would raise funds as needed.

Cowell College would be first, granted to architect Wm. Wurster. Born in Stockton in 1895, Wm. Wurster attended UC Berkeley architectural school, learning the interdependent disciplines of architecture and landscaping under Wm. Hays (architect of the 1928 La Bahia Apartments on Beach Hill). After travels, Wurster set up his 1924 practice in San Francisco, with his mentor Bernard Maybeck, landscape architect Thomas Church, and Joseph Esherick. Wurster’s 1928 Gregory Farmhouse in Scotts Valley, inspired both the California Ranch House style, and the Second Bay Tradition Style.

Marion Hollins hired Wurster in 1930 to design early California type homes for her Pasatiempo Golf Course, with landscaping by Pasatiempo resident, Thomas Church. Church would develop the “California Style Garden,” with apprentices Lawrence Halprin and Robert Royston (all of whom would landscaped UCSC). Wurster designed Pacific Avenue’s J.J. Newberry Store (Woolworth’s) in 1938, the J.C. Penny’s Building in 1946, and Cowden’s medical offices in 1939 at 230 Walnut Ave. In 1945 Wurster founded Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, then in 1950 brought architecture, landscaping, and urban planning, together in the new UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. The 1966 design for Cowell College demonstrates Wurster’s dramatic landscaped settings for indoor-outdoor living.

Wurster’s friend Esherick, a Sea Ranch architect (Third Bay Tradition), was hired to design Stevenson College 1966-to-68.  Esherick didn’t make any local friends recommending the 1972 demolition of downtown’s first National registered landmark, the McHugh & Bianchi Building, at Mission Street and Pacific Avenue. It was demolished in 1973, and Esherick replaced it with his World Savings Bank design, which historian John Chase called “mediocre.” Roy Rydell was the landscape architect for Pacific Avenue’s 1969 Pacific Garden Mall and tried to prevent the demolition of the McHugh & Bianchi Landmark.

Perhaps one of the most talented UCSC architects was also the least famous, Ernest Kump, assigned to build Crown College. Born in Bakersfield to a father who abandoned his family in 1914 to open an architectural firm in Fresno. Ernest Jr. graduated UC Berkeley, but in 1933 had to give up his Harvard master’s degree when the money ran out. He was hired by his father, who then fired him for designs resembling chicken sheds. Kump was hired by Charles Franklin, who became his partner in 1937. Their 1941 design for Fresno City Hall was selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 as one of the most significant American structures of the decade.

He moved his firm to the Bay Area during World War II, to test his ideas about modular and prefabricated construction for the navy. He created a system called Prebilt of low-cost prefabricated units and methods, and collaborated with Wurster to create defense housing.

Through Kump’s system, he designed one of the first multi-story glass-walled buildings at Hunter’s Point shipyards. Staying in San Francisco after the war, Kump’s pioneering work led to 59 patents. Princeton made him a speaker at their 1947 symposium with other top architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Wurster, to Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson. Kump called for “…architecture without buildings! This means essentially that architecture must be intrinsically a total dynamic and living environmental system, in harmony with nature instead of a “soulless wasteland.”

In a 1957 article for AIA Journal, Kump declared architecture was the “expression of feeling through ordered space environment….” This was after the 1955 San Lorenzo River Flood, and Kump was brought to Santa Cruz to construct the 1960 Water Treatment Plant, then stayed to design the “San Lorenzo Plaza” shopping center on land west of Front Street cleared after the flood. His buildings were Long’s Drugs (now CVS), Albertson’s (Trader Joe’s), Crocker Bank (County Bank), and the Park Plaza Building. He also designed the River Twin Cinema and Wells Fargo Bank. Even while admiring his designs, downtown merchants were disappointed that the development turned a blank wall to Front Street, leaving no direct pedestrian connection between downtown and the shopping center.

Kump’s 1961 Foothill College in Los Altos was called his masterpiece, and became a prototype for his design of Cabrillo College. Christopher Arnold said Foothill College “…solved a problem in California architecture, that of finding a form for larger institutional suburban buildings that would match the comfortable casualness of the suburban house.  …It did it by a planning method that broke down a huge campus into a large number of smaller buildings.” Kump evolved a system of construction using available materials and practices, organized into supermodules.

The construction of Cabrillo College furthered Kump’s demonstration of his innovative methods and techniques, like the integrated ceiling system. When I was given a tour of the Cabrillo College campus in 1973, we were joined by an out-of-county visitor seeking ideas for their own new college. We were told many studied this campus for its low cost construction innovations, using simple features in an aesthetic manner. The buildings were inspired by Gen. Mariano Vallejo’s 1830s ranch adobe near Petaluma, yet interpreted in modern materials. These included sonotube cardboard cores for casting pillars, slumpstone tan-concrete bricks resembling adobe, shake shingled hipped roofs with pierced gables, and Frank Lloyd Wright-style interiors of natural unpolished wood surfaces.  The buildings were laid out like a Mediterranean hill town, with a central square between the auditorium and administration buildings.  Most of the campus was wheel-chair accessible (unusual at the time), with ground ivy providing drought-tolerant year-round greenscape, and collegiate overtones.

Kump was brought in as an architect for UC Santa Cruz, designing what’s now the Hahn Student Services building in 1965, and Crown College in 1967-68.

While most of the early collages sought a logical blending with the forest canopy, Sea Ranch founders Charles W. Moore and Wm. Turnbull Jr. designed the 1973 Kresgie College like a stage set for an Italian hill town, making such a dramatic statement, it has been called one of the seminal buildings in American architecture. Less successful was Turnbull’s sloppy 1993 conversion/addition in downtown Santa Cruz, called the Museum of Art & History.

And who would think a Central Heating Plant could be a delight? Yet the 1966 UCSC building has three arched garage doors, topped with twin hops-kiln roof pyramids. This was by the firm of Eliott Spencer, A.S. Lee & Wm. Busse with Roy Rydell, the same team that designed the 1968 UCSC Communications Building, and the 1968 Santa Cruz Main Library.

Sign up for email newsletters