Contents Introduction i Early Life 1 Coming to UC Santa Cruz as a Student in 1967 5 Architecture School at Princeton University 17 Master’s Thesis on UCSC’s College Eight 24 Working as an Architect 29 Working as a Consultant for UC Santa Cruz 35 Becoming an Associate Architect at UC Santa Cruz 37 Bay Region Style 47 Learning the Job 49 Building a New Science Library 57 2 Other Early Architectural Projects at UC Santa Cruz 82 Cowell College Office Facility 82 Sinsheimer Labs 85 The Student Center 89 The Physical Education Facility 99 Colleges Nine and Ten 105 The Evolution of Planning at UC Santa Cruz 139 A History of Long Range Development Plans at UC Santa Cruz 143 The 1963 Long Range Development Plan 147 Long Range Development Plans in the 1970s 151 The 1988 Long Range Development Plan 152 The 2005 Long Range Development Plan 158 Campus Planning and the Overall Campus Structure 165 The Collaborative Relationship Between Physical Planning & Construction and Capital Planning 168 3 Building a Physical Planning & Construction Staff 170 Growth and Stewardship 174 More on the 2005 Long Range Development Plan 178 Strategic Futures Committee 182 Cooper, Robertson and Partners 187 The LRDP and the California Environmental Quality Act 198 The LRDP and Public Hearings 201 Enrollment Levels and the LRDP 203 Town-Gown Relations 212 The Dynamic Nature of Campus Planning 217 The LRDP Implementation Program 223 Design Advisory Board 229 Campus Physical Planning Advisory Committee 242 Working with the Office of the President 248 Different Kinds of Construction Contracts 254 4 More on the LRDP Implementation Program 262 The Marine Science Campus 264 Teaching Architecture Classes at UCSC 268 Association of University Architects 272 A Chronological Oral History Tour of UCSC Campus Buildings 278 Cowell and Stevenson College Expansions 279 The East Fieldhouse Facilities 281 Student Center (Academic Resources Center) 283 The University Club 285 Sinsheimer Laboratories 286 College Eight 287 Science & Engineering Library 293 Earth & Marine Sciences Building 296 More on Colleges Nine and Ten 298 Music Building 299 5 Seismic Upgrade of Natural Sciences 2 313 The Loma Prieta Earthquake 320 Baskin Visual Arts Complex and the Arts Area Master Plan 328 Seymour Marine Discovery Center 332 The Wellness Center 336 Bay Tree Bookstore Expansion and the Graduate Commons 338 More on the Core West Parking Structure 351 Interdisciplinary Sciences Building 352 Center for Adaptive Optics 361 Cowell, Stevenson, and Porter College Student Apartments 363 Physical Sciences Building 365 Engineering Building 373 Humanities and Social Sciences Building 381 Emergency Response Center 385 McHenry Library Addition and Renovation 387 6 Cowell Student Health Center 391 Digital Arts Facility 393 Ranch View Terrace 396 Porter College Residence Halls Upgrade 398 Biomedical Sciences Building 400 Getty Campus Heritage Grant 402 UCSC and Sustainability 403 Reflecting Back on A Long Career 412 Julia Armstrong-Zwart 414 Looking to the Future 416 i Introduction [Francis] Frank M. Zwart III arrived at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a student at Cowell College in 1967, when the campus was a mere two years old and the students were “walking across planks where pipe trenches were still open.” Born in 1950 in Pasadena, California, Zwart is the oldest of five children and the son of an accountant. Zwart graduated in mathematics from UCSC, but had no desire to become a mathematician. Instead, he drew inspiration from his mentor, the British art historian and UCSC professor Jasper Rose, who suggested he might want to pursue architecture as a career. He boarded a train east to study architecture at Princeton University. A westerner at heart, he missed California dreadfully and recalled, “In the distance, rising out of the New Jersey deciduous forest, were these Gothic towers. And I just said to myself, what have I done? . I wanted to be eating a burrito, driving in a convertible with the top down, down the Santa Monica Freeway.” Despite his longings for the pleasures of the Golden State, Zwart persevered and earned his master’s degree in architecture from Princeton in 1976. He then entered a period of broad exposure to the profession, working with architectural firms in Princeton, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Aptos, California (just south of Santa Cruz), Philadelphia, and Carmel before returning to UC Santa Cruz in 1985 as a staff architect and project manager. Thus he commenced a long and distinguished career at UCSC that spanned the tenures of seven UCSC chancellors. ii Zwart became Campus Architect in 1988 and directed UCSC’s Office of Physical Planning & Construction (PP&C) until his retirement in April 2010. (From 1999 until 2010 he also held the title of Associate Vice Chancellor for Physical Planning & Construction.) Due to Zwart’s long tenure, this oral history, conducted as part of the Regional History Project’s University History Series, documents over four decades of growth at UC Santa Cruz. It encompasses Zwart’s years as an undergraduate during the late 1960s, when the campus gained national attention as a prestigious and visionary experiment in public higher education; his career as Campus Architect during UCSC’s exponential expansion into a major research university; and more recent challenges such as the state budget crisis that is reshaping the landscape of public higher education in California even as this oral history reaches completion. UC Santa Cruz opened in 1965 with 650 students who lived in temporary trailers. The original plan was for the campus to grow to 27,500 students through construction of a series of clustered colleges that each would have a distinct thematic and architectural identity. These colleges, of which there are now ten, surround a campus core of science and library buildings. For a variety of reasons, some of them environmental, campus enrollment has remained much smaller than the original projections. UC Santa Cruz now enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate students and 1500 graduate students. The campus was built on the former site of the Cowell Ranch, a lime and cement company owned by Henry Cowell, a Massachusetts entrepreneur who moved west to earn a fortune in lime and real estate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zwart remarked in his oral history, “Everybody thinks, well, redwood iii is the indigenous building material of the campus. Well, it is an indigenous building material. But given that the Cowell Ranch and the Henry Cowell Lime and Cement Company made lime that went into cement, so is concrete. The first Long Range Development Plan called it out as the favored building material for the campus.” Indeed, most of the campus’s buildings are built of concrete. UC Santa Cruz bears the imprint of many luminaries in American architecture, among them John Carl Warnecke, who in 1962 was selected by the Regents as Master Plan Architect for the new campus on the Monterey Bay. According to the New York Times, Warnecke, who died in April 2010, the same month in which Frank Zwart retired, “established a flourishing architectural practice in San Francisco noted for its commitment to contextualism—a respect for local surroundings when designing a building.”1 In 1962, Warnecke was hired by the Kennedy administration to redesign and preserve historic Lafayette Square across from the White House. He later designed environmentally sensitive buildings at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz. Warnecke chose Ernest J. Kump and Theodore C. Bernardi, as well as Robert Anshen of the firm Anshen and Allen as consulting architects. Kump was an international expert in school planning who, a few years earlier, had designed Foothill College in Los Altos and Cabrillo College which opened in Aptos, California. At UCSC, Kump would design the Central Services Building (now 1 William Grimes, “John Carl Warnecke, Architect to Kennedy, Dies at 91” New York Times April 22, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/arts/design/23warnecke.html iv known as Hahn Student Services), and Crown College. Bernardi worked for the modernist firm Wurster, Bernardi, & Emmons (WBE), which won the American Institute of Architects architectural firm award in 1965. He designed UCSC’s Cowell College. Anshen and Allen designed Natural Sciences Units 1 (Thimann Labs) and 2. The Regents appointed the illustrious landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church, father of the modern movement in architecture known as “California style,” as the consultant for the 1963 Long Range Development Plan which would provide the vision for how the academic plan for the campus would be translated into physical reality. Thomas Church’s words have inspired and guided future generations of UCSC campus planners, including Frank Zwart. Church wrote, in the 1963 LRDP With the exception of areas especially preserved in their natural state the general effect in the main campus areas must be one of sensitive collaboration between the designer and this specular environment with the intent that neither shall impose unduly upon the other. To a greater extent than any of us have faced heretofore, the buildings are less important in the visual composition than the trees. Instead of remaking the land, the land must remake our standard conceptions of building and plaza and parking lot. Throughout the years, UC Santa Cruz has faced planning and architectural challenges that arise from its spectacular and unparalleled setting in 2000 acres of redwood groves, deep ravines, and