The Bruins will try to avoid another home upset this weekend.
“You can’t guarantee that you’re going to have your best game every day, but you can be focused on being the best you can be that day,” said assistant coach Kirk Walker. “And if we can stay there, then hopefully good things happen for us.”
No. 2 UCLA softball (40-2, 14-1 Pac-12) will face off against unranked Utah (15-29, 4-11) this weekend in a three-game home series.
Utah currently holds a losing record both overall and in conference play this season. However, the Utes have pulled off a few upsets against top-ranked teams this season.
Utah is coming off a series against Washington in which it upset the No. 4 team in the country by a score of 5-4 after rallying from being down 4-0 with the help of a grand slam by Alyssa Barrera. Barrera is currently leading the conference in triples and ranks in the top 10 in batting average among Pac-12 hitters at .390.
“Even if you’re a team that’s in the bottom half of our conference, you could on any day beat one of the teams at the top of our conference because there’s that much talent in our conference,” Walker said. “When you have a team that’s struggled to get a win and they get a chance in the game, the tenacity just goes through the roof.”
While UCLA is coming off a sweep at Oregon State, it was recently upset by unranked Oregon at home.
“I mean, (an upset) happened to us with Oregon, so it can literally happen to anyone,” said sophomore pitcher Holly Azevedo. “If a team’s hot, they’re hot in the game, you know? It’s just momentum at that point.”
The Bruins do have an advantage over the Utes in terms of pitching, as UCLA currently holds the best ERA in the Pac-12 at 1.21. The Bruins are led in the circle by redshirt junior Rachel Garcia’s 0.68 individual ERA, which is also good for best in the conference. In contrast, Utah has the worst ERA in the conference at 6.54, and none of its regular pitchers have an ERA better than 5.23.
Redshirt sophomoreutility Aaliyah Jordan said that in order for UCLA to get the wins this weekend and avoid any possible upsets, the team needs to start strong against the Utah pitchers and never let up.
“Anything can happen, so when we get ahead, we need to just stay ahead,” Jordan said. “If we score eight runs in the first inning, just don’t let that be the only inning we score, but continuously score because anybody can come back at any time.”
This weekend also marks Alumni Weekend for the Bruins, who will welcome back former players for the annual event.
“It’s always a little special when we always have alumni here,” Walker said. “It feels extra special to represent the program and its history and I know that it’s a great opportunity for me to see a lot of friends and players that I coached as well.”
The series will begin at 7 p.m. on Friday night at Easton Stadium.
The Bruins will have an opportunity to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
No. 4 UCLA women’s water polo (21-5, 4-2 MPSF) will play at Stanford on Friday against No. 6 Arizona State (12-11, 1-5) in the MPSF championship. Should the Bruins win the championship, they will receive an automatic bid to play in the NCAA tournament.
In UCLA’s matchup with Arizona State earlier this season, the Bruins pulled away in the second half for a 12-9 victory after leading by just one at the half.
UCLA lost to No. 1 USC (23-1, 5-1) by a score of 9-8 earlier this season. The Bruins had a chance to tie the game in the final period, but came up short.
“The USC girls have been playing extremely well – they are a great opponent,” said junior attacker Bronte Halligan. “These are my favorite games to play as a Bruin.”
Coach Adam Wright said the team fell short in completing the upset against its crosstown rival because of lack of belief in itself down the stretch.
“They have to start trusting themselves,” Wright said. “Overall, they hung in there and they had a chance to tie it up at the end.”
With a close loss behind them, the team faces the possibility of meeting USC again this weekend at the conference championships.
Wright said the Bruins will need to clean up a number of things that plagued them in their previous meeting with the Trojans before the MPSF tournament.
“Some of the goals we gave up early on,” Wright said. “Small little mistakes of us (stopping) swimming early, not getting to the right shoulder.”
Senior attacker Lizette Rozeboom also mentioned that the team will need to focus on staying in the moment.
“Part of our mentality is that we just keep going,” Rozeboom said. “We don’t look at the past or the future, we just keep going – we can’t focus on the now.”
Going into the weekend, Halligan said the underclassmen need to up their confidence upon entering the game.
“We have a lot of younger players that play big minutes,” Halligan said. “It’s up to them to now step up and know that the whole team is behind them and can totally back them.”
UCLA will face Arizona State in the MPSF championships Friday at 12:45 p.m. at the Avery Aquatic Center in Stanford, California.
Make it seven sweeps of Pac-12 teams for the Bruins.
No. 1 seed UCLA beach volleyball (29-1) opened the Pac-12 championships with a 3-0 win over No. 9 seed Oregon (5-10-1). The Bruins swept all three courts that finished and led on courts two and three despite being truncated.
Seniors Nicole and Megan McNamara clinched the win with a 21-13, 21-17 victory on court one. Nicole McNamara ended the match with a kill to the left that the Ducks could not return.
After learning it was playing Oregon just hours before the game, coach Stein Metzger said his team made sure it was ready for any opponent it should come up against.
“We have two scouting reports for each game,” Metzger said. “Once we know who we are going to face, we throw one away. But we also work on playing our game because if we play like we know we can, then we can win.”
Senior Izzy Carey and freshman Lindsey Sparks earned the first point for the Bruins, winning 21-12, 21-8 on court five. Carey’s last serve bounced off the top of the net and hit the sand before the Ducks could reach it.
On court four, the pair of sophomore Lea Monkhouse and junior Savvy Simo took down its opposition by a score of 21-13, 21-10. Monkhouse hit a spike right to an Oregon player, but the ball was too high for the Duck to return.
“(The goal) is to show our dominance,” Sparks said. “We just focus on ourselves and play against whoever is up next.”
Two other matches were underway, but truncated once the win was sealed. Senior Zana Muno and freshman Abby Van Winkle had multiple chances to win their match on court three, but the pair could not finish their opponents quickly enough, ending at 21-13, 23-22.
Senior Sarah Sponcil and junior Lily Justine were two points away from closing it out. The duo led 21-13, 19-13 when their game was stopped prematurely.
Megan McNamara said she is trying to take in the opportunity to further her team’s success in her final season.
“The team goal is to become two-time Pac-12 champions,” said Megan McNamara. “Personally, it’s about enjoying every moment out here because this is the last time I’ll be wearing a UCLA jersey.”
UCLA will face No. 4 seed Arizona (25-4) on Friday in the winners’ bracket quarterfinals. Metzger said the team will use the break to be at 100% before facing the Wildcats.
“It’s actually a longer break than we usually have,” Metzger said. “We’ll go back and scout but we’re just looking one game at a time and not trying to look any further than that.”
For the second week in a row, the Bruins are trying something new on the mound.
No. 1 UCLA baseball (31-7, 11-4 Pac-12) will host unranked Utah (12-22, 4-14) in its last home series for three weeks. Junior right-hander Ryan Garcia will get the start Friday as sophomore right-hander Zach Pettway – who has started all 9 series-openers for the Bruins – is out with a flexor strain.
Redshirt junior right-hander Jack Ralston will slide back into the role as No. 2 starter after a one-week hiatus, while coach John Savage has not announced his Sunday starter yet.
Pettway owned a 2.66 ERA with 49 strikeouts and two home runs allowed through his first six starts. In his last four appearances, he has allowed five home runs and struck out just 11 batters en route to a 7.94 ERA over that time period.
Garcia suffered from flexor inflammation during the preseason, delaying his season debut until March 9. The righty’s ERA has never tipped above 2.35 this season, and it currently sits at 1.35. Garcia – who was projected to be UCLA’s Friday starter before the season started – was the team’s Sunday guy upon his return until he moved up a spot in the rotation for the Cal series.
Garcia punched out eight-plus batters in five of his six starts with about 12.4 strikeouts per nine innings on the season.
As a whole, the Bruins own a Pac-12-best 2.71 ERA, while the Utes’ mark of 5.90 ranks ninth in the conference.
Utah has also yet to announce its Sunday starter, but left-handers Riley Pierce and Joshua Tedeschi are locked in to take the mound Friday and Saturday, respectively. Pierce is 1-5 with a 6.08 ERA, while Tedeschi is 5-3 with a 5.50 ERA.
The Bruins have been D1Baseball’s No. 1 team in the country for a program-record six weeks, but have also managed to fight their way to the top of the RPI.
UCLA has the highest strength of schedule this season as well, with just six of its 38 games so far coming against schools ranked outside the top 100 for RPI – boasting a 5-1 record in those matchups. Utah ranks No. 125 in the RPI and is an imperfect 0-7 against top-25 teams.
UCLA swallowed an upset loss against then-No. 64 Cal last Friday, but the Bruins have won their last seven matchups with the Utes with a six-run average margin of victory.
The UCLA-Utah series this weekend marks the second-to-last home series for the Bruins this year, with 11 of their final 15 games coming on the road. However, the Bruins’ top rank puts them in line to host both the NCAA regionals and super regionals come June.
First pitch on Friday will be at 6 p.m., with 2 p.m. and 1 p.m. start times on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
Architecture can feel unfamiliar without simultaneously feeling alien – William O’Brien Jr. will propose this idea in his upcoming lecture at UCLA.
Instead of generating entire architectural structures that jar the senses, O’Brien said he is interested in modifying small details that will fascinate audiences without unsettling them. O’Brien, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will give a talk Monday in Perloff Hall as part of the latest iteration of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design lecture series.
The talk will highlight his recent works in production at William O’Brien Jr., or WOJR, his independent design firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In an age where architectural knowledge is readily available online, he said he hopes the conversational style ofhislecture will help students better understand his professional motivations. During the presentation, O’Brien. will also demonstrate how architecture can include digital advancements within the creative process but does not need to become dependent on technology.
“There’s a kind of post-digital agenda latent in the work,” O’Brien said. “We’re interested in making work that is not alien, but ‘other,’ by way of defamiliarization.”
In the past, O’Brien said, architects were fascinated with making unusual structures that felt completely foreign upon first glance – the advancement of digital technology allowed for this kind of experimentation, which often went too far, he said. Instead of producing entirely alien designs, O’Brien said his firm is more interested in tweaking minor details to achieve a sense of unfamiliarity in his works. One of these minor details O’Brien played around with is the proportion of a roof to the rest of a building as seen in his recent project, House of the Woodland, a New England home that is currently in construction.
“We changed the proportion of one thing to take it away from what you thought you knew to something which is uncanny or weird or a little bit different,” O’Brien said.
Shifting proportions are also part of WOJR’s ongoing project, House of Horns, said John Todd, a senior associate at WOJR. The Los Altos project began in 2017, and Todd said the alterations in form lead to a subtle sense of surprise in viewers. In some places, windows cover entire lengths of a wall, or parts of a ceiling are curved to emulate the underside of a ship, he said.
“It becomes a form that defamiliarizes the way people normally experience a roof,” Todd said. “But it also produces these unfamiliar, yet fascinating, zones of lighting and spatial conditions.”
O’Brien said projects like House of Horns also demonstrate how his works balance architecture with the digital age. He said people rely on technology for calculations of complex geometry and digital visualizations of new projects; however, while O’Brien taps into computation and digital thinking, he does not rely on digital technology to be the sole inspiration of his designs, he said.
Rather, O’Brien said he draws inspiration from real-life sources, as seen in another ongoing work: Mask House, in Ithaca, New York. The house is inspired by the life of a young filmmaker whose brother died in the lake that it overlooks. The idea then was to make a place that separates one world from another, O’Brien said. The house has two parts to it, he said, with an outer fence that veils the house behind it.
O'Brien said he drew inspiration from real life sources for the Mask House in Ithica, New York. The house is inspired by a young filmmaker who lost his brother to the lake that the house overlooks. The house also has an outer fence that veils the house behind it. (Courtesy of the company William O’Brien Jr.)
Jon Lott, who partnered with O’Brien on a project called Heart of Hearts, said it was important to him and to O’Brien to estrange a place or an object so it sparks curiosity without being completely alienating. There is a threshold of how much a work can be altered before it stops creating intrigue and generates confusion instead, he said.
“As architects find themselves with tools that allow them to make any form they want, there is an ease with which they can make incredibly defamiliar forms, perhaps too unfamiliar,” Lott said.
O’Brien, Lott said, has a skill for gauging the threshold between curiosity and complete disorientation which is visible in House of the Woodlands. O’Brien said the house makes use of unconventional proportions and an unlikely, enlarged pyramid roof that is curious to the eye rather than distressing.
“The idea is that it feels like it could almost fit the context of something people recognize,” Todd said. “But as you get to know it more and more, you realize there’s a lot of interesting, odd little moments.”
O'Brien said he drew inspiration from real life sources for the Mask House in Ithica, New York. The house is inspired by a young filmmaker who lost his brother to the lake that the house overlooks. The house also has an outer fence that veils the house behind it. (Courtesy of the company William O’Brien Jr.)
Slight modifications such as roof alterations or the variation of proportions are exactly what O’Brien said he intends to showcase at his lecture. Hopefully, it will motivate students to create their own works, he said. However, O’Brien also said he views his lecture as a chance to offer a small contribution to the discipline of architecture rather than a method of pushing the field forward.
“We simply want to have a conversation with creative minds who care about architecture in the way that we do,” O’Brien said.
In the 1980s, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, an elderly Jewish woman with a slight accent, became synonymous with sex, said Liz Goldwyn.
The “The Sex Ed” founder said Westheimer’s lengthy career as a sex therapist was chronicled decades later in director Ryan White’s 2019 documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth.” Her grandmotherly demeanor is familiar to those who watched her on late-night television in the ’80s, Goldwyn said. Westheimer gained notoriety as an instigator of the sexual revolution, discussing taboo topics with an unusual candidness for her era. The documentary focuses primarily on the events leading up to Westheimer’s rise to fame, delving into her formative experiences as a Holocaust survivor. The film was screened at the Hammer Museum on Monday, followed by a Q&A with White and Goldwyn.
“I think people talk a lot now about drinking celery juice, exercising, eating kale and are extremely conscious about wellness, yet completely neglect sexuality as part of this overall wellness,” Goldwyn said. “Dr. Ruth is an icon in this space and normalized the conversation so that we even have the ability to discuss this.”
As White highlights in his documentary, Westheimer did not enter the realm of television until her mid-50s, leaving much of her earlier life shrouded in mystery. The film, aiming to elaborate upon remnants of Westheimer’s past, is not structured chronologically, but rather jumps among the different temporal incarnations of Dr. Ruth. Much of the documentary details 55 years of history, depicting Westheimer’s voyage through the Holocaust, World War II and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the United States, she lived as a single mother in New York, working her way through school without knowing a word of English. White said he collected much of this information from interviewing Westheimer.
“I wasn’t expecting a lot of activity because of her age, but it turns out she’s the most active 90-year-old you will ever meet,” White said. “While teaching two university courses and publishing three books, she was zigzagging all over the world, so just following 90-year-old Dr. Ruth is a huge part of the film to show this woman that won’t slow down.”
Wanting to highlight her use of humor as a disarming mechanism, White said the film weaves in and out of darker, war scenes. It pivots back to the lively, modern Westheimer when he felt the mood was becoming too heavy. He said he aimed to strike a balance with the film’s emotional rhythm – had the film been told chronologically, the tragedy of Westheimer’s life may have overshadowed the accomplishments of her later years.
“Her humor isn’t only present when she’s processing difficult moments in her life, but also in the entirety of her personality that she’s presented to the world,” White said. “If you watch her on television, she was good at using humor to disarm people who weren’t comfortable talking about taboo topics in a public sphere, especially Americans nervous … talking about sex.”
In the process of creating the documentary, her humor led to the film’s crew often breaking the fourth wall, which neither White nor producer Rafael Marmor anticipated. On set, Westheimer would interact with the crew in a typical grandmotherly fashion, fretting over whether everyone had been fed and always insisting on second helpings. She bantered with them as well, offering the sound engineer cookies and telling White he should have called his mother that day during filming, White said.
“The editors started saying early on that we could make this film without involving the filmmaker or the crew, but that it would be to the detriment of Dr. Ruth’s portrayal because it really is the most revealing part about her personality,” Marmor said. “We had countless amounts of these little moments and they’re peppered throughout the film.”
Coupled with Westheimer’s humor, White said he hoped to paint a picture of the events leading up to the modern Dr. Ruth, including a touching moment where she reconnects with her childhood boyfriend in Switzerland at the age of 90. The documentary ends in 1981, stopping at the crux of Westheimer’s fame, once she has finally transitioned into the figure known today.
“As a child, I saw her as this caricature that Johnny Carson used to play of her on SNL while also learning so much in the process regarding sexuality,” White said. “I hope people will understand the significance of this woman that they might not have grown up (with) and get a taste of what that was like to watch her during those times.”
Visitors can witness a new Hammer Museum installation before they even enter the galleries.
“Up Close in Distance,” designed by Yunhee Min, will be on display in the Hammer until Oct. 27. With a design involving pools of paint in differing colors, it is the museum’s first project to be incorporated primarily into the lobby’s floor and staircase. Min, a traditional painter and installation artist based in Los Angeles, said side projects such as “Up Close in Distance” present an opportunity to pursue projects that are not limited by the same constraints as her conventional works.
“(Designing the project) is one of the things that’s interesting for me about doing side projects, because I get to work in a way that I can’t in the studio by myself,” Min said. “So I learned about different processes, technology, fabrication and materials.”
Min’s traditional paintings focus on color, with some projects requiring days of paint mixing to achieve the desired color and consistency. Though Min said “Up Close in Distance” did not require such extensive color preparation, there were multiple other steps involved in creating the piece. Using an entire manufacturing line of enamel paints, Min started by pouring the paint onto a 1% scale model of the lobby. After it dried, a photographer took up-close digital photos of the model. A digital graphics provider then digitally stitched the photos together and printed them onto vinyl flooring for the final installation.
The assembly process also required practical considerations. Adam Peña, the Hammer Museum’s manager of exhibition design and production, said installing the project involved addressing both production and aesthetic problems. For instance, Peña said some details would be lost within the triangular wedge where each step meets the wall. To solve the problem, Min made each wedge a solid color, also placing similarly colored rectangular bars lining the stairs. Min said her design choice calls attention to the architecture while also providing visitors a reference palette of all the colors she used.
The title “Up Close in Distance” directly references the photography aspect of the installation, in that the photos needed to be taken up close in order for the project to be clearly viewed from a distance, Min said. To completely capture the details of the model, she said the camera had to be positioned very close to the surface, beyond the typical viewing distance for the human eye. When designing the layout, Min said she tookthe dynamic nature of the lobby into consideration, viewing it as a transitional space that evokes a sense of anticipation or excitement.
Though the project is focused mostly on the floor and stairs of the Hammer Museum’s lobby, Min said she wanted to incorporate her art throughout the entire space. Min painted the three walls surrounding the staircase a light pink color, which gives the space a subtle glow and creates a sense of volume, she said. Though any color could have been used, she said, the color had to be very close to the default white to be nearly imperceptible. Additionally, Min said she wanted the installation to have a distinct presence that worked against the architecture. For instance, Min said the pattern of the vinyl flooring contrasts the architecture of the space by not aligning itself with the steps.
Priscilla Marin, a fifth-year sociology student visiting the Hammer, said she hadn’t given much attention to the installation because of its incorporation in the floor. The variety of colors complemented each other, but despite seeing the vibrant colors, Marin said the installation’s placement on the floor gave it a subtler presence.
Min said the installation is open to interpretation since everyone experiences color differently. Given the installation’s location in the lobby, she said she hopes visitors have an unexpected experience with a piece of artwork that makes them more aware of the space around them.
“I like that with color, it involves your body,” Min said. “That it is not about a particular message or information, but that it really is anchored or grounded in feeling something through sensation.”
