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Overview

The Faculty Club of the University of California, Santa Barbara, continued the geometrically precise, shed-roofed aesthetic pioneered by architects Charles W. Moore and William Turnbull at the Sea Ranch Condominiums north of San Francisco. At UCSB, this angular, natural, wood-sided look had been transformed to a plaster-sided, red-tile roofed variation, bowing to the city's rich Spanish Colonial Revival heritage and to campus building standards. Working with UCSB campus architect, Thore H. Edgren, MLTW/Moore Turnbull created a relatively spartan design, activated by the introduction of angular walls and rooflines. Its plaster interior walls served as a blank canvas on which MLTW added many contrasting features, including super-graphics, classical allusions or historic architectural fragments. These fragments included Moorish tile work and a carved stone Romanesque arch. To a great extent, this building anticipated later Post-Modernism of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly its pastiche aesthetic with reintroduced historical fragments and sometimes ironic historical allusions. History was presented as a curated assemblage, not as a consistent revivalistic reconstruction.

Building Notes

The thin, scenographic appearance of the UCSB walls presaged a similar aesthetic of MLTW's Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

PCAD id: 20208