While grateful to the Luskins for their generous donation to UCLA, I urge that other sites be considered for the conference center and faculty club. We are replacing a historic, midcentury-modern, one-story structure with a 300,000-square-foot development.
This will disturb the pastoral boundary next to the Holmby-Westwood residential community. It will also lead to a dramatic increase in traffic on this part of campus and remove what is just about the last one-story building on campus ““ one that is so different from everything else on campus.
The people who might attend a meeting at the conference center would much prefer to be close to Westwood, with its restaurants, shops and the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Many of those who seek to preserve and protect the graceful building and gardens are elderly. These are great people in the twilight of their years who did amazing things, like invent the Internet, and who built a university great enough to be worthy of such a generous gift.
Please leave to this community, and those of us in sympathy, this lovely, peaceful, historic place.
If you cannot understand why, perhaps it has been too long since you watched “Avatar.”
R. Michael Rich
Research astronomer