AKA: Club at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Building 581, Santa Barbara, CA

Structure Type: built works - commercial buildings - restaurants; built works - public buildings - schools - university buildings

Designers: Archer-Spencer Engineering Consultants (firm); Davis and Moreau, Structural Engineers (firm); MLTW/Moore-Turnbull, Architects (firm); Archer (mechanical engineer); Bruce Beebe (architect); Marvin Buchanan (architect); Davis (structural engineer); Thore H. Edgren (architect); Donlyn Lyndon (architect); Charles Willard Moore (architect); Moreau (structural engineer); Spencer (mechanical engineer); William Turnbull Jr. (architect)

Dates: constructed 1967-1968

3 stories

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Ocean Road
University of California, Santa Barbara Campus, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

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The UCSB Faciulty Club was located east of Ocean Road and north of Manzanita Village.

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