By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff Over 20 years ago, a student crawled
through a smoke vent on the roof of Royce Hall, trying to sneak
into a Cannonball Adderly tribute. He accidentally snapped off a
sprinkler head on a fire line, letting loose 165 pounds of water
pressure and flooding the building. The fire department arrived to
find no fire, but four inches of water in the dressing rooms and
organ blower room. Furthermore, a cable carrying 2,600 pairs of
telephone lines was filled with water and short circuited, which
caused a small fire in the General Telephone service building in
Westwood. Phones in the UCLA Medical Center were out of order for
over six hours as a result. A lot of incredible events, though most
less absurd than this one, have occurred at Royce Hall in the past
72 years. And through its long history here at UCLA, Royce has come
to represent the university as a whole and reflect its changing
character. The building, completed in 1929, was the first to be
constructed when the university planned a move from its Vermont
Avenue location to the Westwood Hills. Architect David Allison, who
also designed several buildings on the original campus, built Royce
to function as the main classroom building, in addition to housing
an auditorium. Ernest Carroll Moore, the first provost of UCLA,
chose Josiah Royce as the namesake of the hall. Charles H. Reiber
originally suggested Royce as a name for what is now Powell Library
according to the book “Royce Hall” by James Klain and
Arnold J. Band. “His name will not be used if we attach it to
the library,” Moore is reported to have responded. “Let
us ask the Regents instead to call our chief classroom building for
him; then he will always be named whenever that building is
referred to.” Josiah Royce was a philosopher who taught at UC
Berkeley and Harvard. Moore had been a colleague of his, and Reiber
had been his student during his graduate studies, both at the
latter university. Royce spent a great deal of time in Germany and
helped bring to America, the German ideal of higher education
institutions functioning to search for truth rather than to just
impart knowledge. At the suggestion of Moore, the building is a
monument to education as well as a place for it to occur. The
loggias, the vaulted ceilings above the six large arches in the
building’s facade, are painted to represent medieval
professions and the education of the world. On the first floor, the
painted loggias depict the study and practice of the graphic arts,
education, language, biology, history, mathematics,
literature-drama, philosophy, chemistry, music, physics and
astronomy. For the loggias on third floor, Moore named 12
revolutionary thinkers who he thought represented the great leaps
in knowledge, from ancient times to modern. Socrates, Christ,
Aristotle and Plato represent the ancient world, Abelad, Petrarch,
Loyola and Melanchthon the medieval, and Immanuel Kant, Charles
Darwin, Charles W. Eliot and Albert Einstein the modern. At the
time, Einstein was the only living person to be included.
“Lest the young people who come here may think these are just
names of men who never lived at all, take one living man, the
greatest of living scientists, Albert Einstein,” said Moore
according to “Royce Hall.” Over the years, Royce has
come to represent not just the educational ideals that Moore was
interested in, but also popular and classical entertainment. The
auditorium’s original design allowed for a boxing ring to be
set up, fitting in with the vision that Royce was a building for
the students. Even the performances that took place in Royce Hall
were incredibly student-oriented. The first shows were performed
and attended by students. “(Moore) wanted the students and
the faculty to do the performing,” said James Klain, the
author of “Royce Hall,” in a phone interview. A few
years after the auditorium opened, a stream of notable speakers
came to its stage. Appearing at Royce only three years after it was
finished, nobel laureate Albert Einstein drew a full crowd for his
lecture, delivered in German. Other nobel laureates who spoke in
the Royce auditorium include poet T.S. Eliot in 1933, philosopher
Bertrand Russell in 1939, chemist Linus Pauling in 1958 and UN
undersecretary and UCLA alumnus Ralph Bunche in 1961. Prominent
popular music artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan and
Simon and Garfunkel, took the stage in the 1960s, followed by Elton
John, Frank Zappa and The Ramones, among others, in the ’70s.
In the 1980s, Royce played a part in the Los Angeles-hosted
Olympics. Some of the cultural events, customary counterparts to
the games, were held in Royce. The well-regarded Royal Shakespeare
Company performed for two weeks as part of that program. The
building also underwent its first major restoration in this decade.
Starting in 1984, it was closed for 18 months to improve the
acoustics and seating of the auditorium. Also, the equipment in the
boiler room, which originally provided hot water to the campus, was
removed and an addition was made in the west side of the building.
Following the Northridge earthquake in 1994, a major emergency
seismic renovation was required. “We were very interested in
treating it better than it had been treated in the past,”
said Barton Phelps, FAIA, the design architect on the project and
an adjunct professor in the department of architecture and urban
design. Tens of millions of dollars were spent to re-align the
towers, which had shifted six inches out of place, strengthening
the structure and further updating the acoustics of the auditorium
to accommodate both speakers and musicians. The building almost
doubled in weight, from its original 40 million pounds to 70
million after concrete supports were added. “We like to say
we inserted a new building in the old building and no one can
tell,” said Phelps. When it reopened, the auditorium was host
to a gala event where Paul Reiser, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Don
Henly, John Lithgow, James Galway, Heather Locklear, Sidney Poitier
and Carol Burnett made appearances. With the addition of Elvis
Costello as the artist-in-residence, performances are scheduled to
include acts like Sonic Youth and All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Royce is a building that not only reflects and represents the
student body, but also, in cases like the flood-causing Cannonball
Adderly fan, has been affected by it. Through its popular speakers,
rock concerts and educational prowess, Royce is a building that
represents the student body and the spirit of UCLA.
With reports from Antero Garcia, Daily Bruin Senior Staff.
ROYCE HALL’S ASYMMETRY
Some of the building’s architectual inconsistencies. Can you find
the rest?
KEY
1. Three windows on left, two on right 2. Three windows on left,
two on right 3. Two windows on left that are not on the right side.
4. Windows are different. 5. Different width of brick in detailing.
6. Different number of stripes. 7. Stripes offset on right tower.
8. Two blocks on left, three blocks on right. 9. Top bricks longer
on top, and don’t match on bottom 10. Bricks connect on right,
jagged on left 11. Pattern in arches over three doors is different
12. Brick decoration over the nine windows is different. 13. Brick
decoration over the three windows is different. 14. Bricks over the
three arches are different. 15. White stones are asymmetrical
around the three windows 16. Brick medallion 17. Bricks arranged
differently around two windows. 18. Only windows with grating. 19.
Symbol over each arch is different 20. Bricks sunken on right
tower, flat on left. 21. White stone goes higher on left tower. 22.
Inner decoration of windows is different. 23. The one column on the
right tower interrupts the small arches that cross it. The two
columns on the left run between the arches but don’t cross them.
24. The columns on the left are round, the column on the right is
flat. x 16 brick difference – 41 inconsistent bricks on the two
towers