University of California, Los Angeles

Adaptive Reuse Projects:

Limited by the size of its urban campus, UCLA has adapted numerous buildings to suit the changing needs of the campus community. In recent years, the university has completed overhauls of the Women’s and Men’s Gymnasiums (one of the former gymnasiums is pictured), giving rise to new classrooms, office space, an outdoor theater and a state-of-the-art performance venue. In late 2006, UCLA also opened the doors to the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center.

For about four decades, the dance department at UCLA was headquartered in a gymnasium.

The first floor was dominated by old, unused locker rooms and the main dance floor was a former basketball court lined by gymnasium-style bleacher seats.

But in late 2005, after several years of construction, the building, renamed Glorya Kaufman Hall, reopened with a state-of-the-art performance venue, an outdoor pavilion theater and new offices and classrooms.

The interior of the revamped building, originally constructed in 1932 as the Women’s Gymnasium, was almost unrecognizable, but on a university campus marked by its Romanesque Revival architecture the exterior was unchanged.

“We’ve taken care of our older buildings,the jewels of our campus,” said Jeff Averill, the university’s campus architect. “We’ve taken care of them and given them new life.”

In recent years, campus planners have adopted adaptive reuse strategies by design and by necessity to guide many campus construction projects. Limited by space, cost and a desire to maintain the architectural look of many of its original structures, the university has updated and adapted a number of its buildings to suit the changing needs of its students, faculty and community.

In the mid-1980s, UCLA embarked upon a long-term seismic retrofitting project for campus buildings. This process was given greater impetus after the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged campus structures. With state and federal money flowing in to repair earthquake damage, university officials grabbed the opportunity to not only repair but enhance several core buildings.

Buoyed by large private donations and a student fee referendum, the university was able to undertake projects to update and adapt outdated campus buildings.

An $18 million gift from philanthropist Glorya Kaufman allowed UCLA to alter the former Women’s Gymnasium in ways the original designers never envisioned. “It is really true adaptive reuse because it is different from what the building was designed for,” Averill said.

Christopher Waterman, dean of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, said the adaptation of the building allows professors in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, which houses the former dance department, to more effectively pursue the university’s core missions.

“The renovation really supports the kind of creative exploration that goes on in our departments,” Waterman said. “It was really a profound transformation inside.”

Along with the former Women’s Gymnasium, the university updated the building’s companion, the Men’s Gymnasium. Also built in 1932, the men’s gym featured a basketball court formerly used for practice by the UCLA basketball team. The building reopened in 2003 as the Student Activities Center, still sporting a basketball court but no longer encumbered by two floors of locker rooms.

The new building helped relieve overcrowding in neighboring Kerckhoff Hall, which houses a variety of student groups, by giving space to the organizations. The building provided new homes for the Center for Women and Men, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, the Graduate Student Resource Center and other groups in space once occupied by locker rooms.

Across campus, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center opened in late 2006 to rave reviews. The building, which maintained only the bones of the old Dickson Hall art building, has been improved to allow art students to pursue educational opportunities not available to them in the building’s previous incarnation.

The renovated building provides space to take advantage of computer technology as well as light-controlled areas valuable to some painters. “In essence, this is really a new building,” Waterman said.