The University Union Plaza “extreme makeover” is an appalling act of cultural vandalism against the best piece of modern architecture on the Central Coast. It replaces something of great value with something banal, mediocre, insipid, dysfunctional and lacking in humane qualities.
The UU, including its plaza, was an exciting 1970s design from one of California’s most distinguished architects, Joseph Esherick. This design emerged at the moment Modernism was falling apart. Many architects were abandoning Modernism. Others, like Esherick, sought to reclaim its original utopian humanism, and we see this in the UU’s focus on abundant opportunities for unscripted human interaction and improvisation.
The plaza design was an inspired one. Faced with a sloping site, its designers realized they could create a wonderful sunken outdoor living room separated from the noisy roadway at its side. Like great Italian piazzas (probably its inspiration), this outdoor room provides a place of repose and a place for action. Its pathways to the street pass between asymmetrical walls of seating (reminiscent of passage along streets leading to a piazza) – places to snooze, talk with friends, catch the rays, eat lunch, or just kick back and watch the passing “theater” of pedestrians moving to and from the plaza’s large, but carefully-shaped, main space. The scale is intimate, related to human proportions. A fun fountain good for foot cooling was removed in an earlier act of design vandalism.
The proposed makeover obliterates these humane qualities – indeed it obliterates the outdoor room by opening its outer wall to the stinky, noisy bus stop. Instead it proposes a pedestrian freeway, lacking human scale and amenity, linking road and building, a pompously monumental overwrought symmetrical nonentity worthy of a Target parking lot entrance. Everything good about the current plaza is being destroyed.
Those behind this scheme should be ashamed of it, and of its inevitable destruction of UU social interaction. One can only hope this wanton cultural vandalism never comes to pass.
Richard Schmidt is a lecturer in the architecture department and a Mustang Daily guest columnist.