Kresge College and UC Santa Cruz: Transformation and stewardship; past, present, future
The final Kresge College Renovation campus community workshop with architects Studio Gang will be Monday, October 24, 6–8pm at Kresge Town Hall.
Nowhere is the idiom “seeing the forest for the trees” more meaningful than at UC Santa Cruz. The experience of the campus is defined by the way forest and buildings, with meadows and plazas, hide and reveal one another. Let yourself become a little lost in the forest and discover the different identities of each college by walking between them, or a revelation of ecological habitat upon stepping into a clearing. In the way the natural and built weave repeatedly, the campus becomes something greater than what is literally apparent. An unparalleled site befitting an unparalleled education, one through its very design able to motivate students to ask questions about the world around themselves, connecting parts and whole.
This quality of campus design was an intentional decision. An alternative to a typical Jeffersonian plan with a central lawn complete with social hierarchy, the collage-like juxtaposition of natural and built was the inspiration of landscape architect Thomas D. Church who collaborated on the original 1963 Long Range Development Plan. It is relevant to recall that when the 1963 plan was drafted, the Cowell Ranch site was mostly clear cut. The very vision of a campus to come required an appreciation that as beautiful as the hillside location was, the natural and built environment would both, hand-in-hand, evolve: natural ecology and human ecology, each modifying the other, continuous and simultaneous, site and buildings, in a conversation of cause and effect.
The sum of this narrative is UC Santa Cruz. In this sense, I want to remember it is not only the natural environment which should be treated with respect as it changes over time but the built environment also. And therefore the whole environment, transforming, requires responsible care, management, planning, and design — stewardship.
Kresge College, created in 1971 as the sixth UC Santa Cruz college, I believe shares this philosophy of stewarded transformation implicit of the overall campus. Paralleling Church’s insight to see a university evolving in dialogue with nature, architect Charles Moore and founding Provost Robert Edgar proposed an educational setting with a premise of the human environment as being alive and undergoing dynamic change. To construct this vision in the real world meant creating means and methods of academic programming and physical design allowing the community as a whole to sustain participation in processes of social transformation — to be stewards of their own community. Kresge was themed on participatory democracy. An idea as relevant now as it was then.
The participation aspect of a democracy — “demos” in Greek meaning all citizens, everyone — implies that the way a society changes is compelled through the intentional involvement of people. The aim was to make the organizational structure of the college, as a site of living and learning, evolve through the agency of its members. This began with Edgar’s course “Creating Kresge College” which asked students to imagine and project forward ideas about their community’s needs and desires. For many years the practice of consensus decision-making was used for the management of the college; students, faculty and staff, all participants with voice. Today these values are still widely part of Kresge’s ethos and are evident in student-run businesses and programs using the economic model of worker cooperatives, such as the Food Co-op.
It is clear to me architect Charles Moore understood, how much like a democracy, the architecture of the built environment itself transforms through human interpretation and use. The most explicit example was Moore’s experiment of giving a construction allowance to student residents in the first Kresge class to design the interior layout of their apartments. For better or worse, this required multiple students of each apartment to collaborate and own their decisions by living with them. The main “street” forming the backbone of the entire college continued the conversation beyond the privacy of residences. By bending a conventional circulation artery around a forest glen into its well-known L-like shape, Moore reinterpreted how the street worked, intending it to do more than serve only the efficient, passing movement of students. The bent street is held in place by two spaces at each end swelling as sites for collective community action. At the one end is a formal gathering place, Kresge Town Hall, and at the other end, an informal gathering place, the Kresge Piazza. The street pinned by these two poles is forced into an ever-present proximity with the glen; nature and built clasped together. Furthermore, the peculiar folding of steps climbing the topography at the street’s angled corner are a tactile expression of the perpetual tension between the two anchors of participation, formal and informal, that continue to play out in democracy.
Kresge is an academic and physical framework for an ever-evolving conversation about democracy. The discussion does not happen by itself; it is created by people. At the present moment, Kresge College and UC Santa Cruz are at a crossroads of change. I believe there is merit to having conversations about the decisions informing its future. Much as the campus’ evolving dialogue between nature and built is both cause and effect for asking questions about how that very dialogue is working, the conversation at Kresge College between its site and programming is both cause and effect, inspiration and rational justification, for community participation in a process deciding how the college will evolve when absorbing present realities.
At the request of the UC Office of the President, UC Santa Cruz is seeking to find a way to manage rising enrollment. The growth is a UC state-wide response to providing educational access to an increasing number of high school graduates meeting admissions criteria. On campus, this has meant increasing student population gradually toward 19,500, as determined through the most recent 2005–2020 Long Range Development Plan and its following legal settlements. In recent years, on-campus housing has been modified with the intention to use existing buildings efficiently and hold more students. This clearly puts a strain on student resources and experiences. Double rooms have become triples, triple rooms have become quads. In this context, UC Santa Cruz Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services identified Kresge College as a way to address growth and add housing, while combining it with the needed maintenance of Kresge’s buildings which are deteriorating. This is the current Kresge College Renovation project.
Beginning in February 2016, Kresge College and university officials formed a committee and worked with Brightspot Strategy by holding constituent workshops each month to outline a vision for the college’s future. The research proposed goals and recommendations for space allocation, published in the Kresge Vision Brief released in summer 2016 (PDF link). The college would be denser, with scenarios based on a community enlarged from the current 363 beds to about 500 or 600. The Vision Brief uses this program as the base for searching for a “kit-of-parts” for the college, including academic classrooms and offices, administrative and student life support, as well as space for sustaining existing programs such as the Co-ops. Following the research for the Vision Brief, in spring 2016, the university hired the architecture firm of MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang, to study a range of potential strategies for this “kit-of-parts”, from minimal renovation to demolition and rebuilding, to gauge consequences and potential of each. This “Planning and Preliminary Programming Phase” has given the campus the opportunity to work with Studio Gang and visualize the physical massing of strategies, and see how different parts interconnect to make a college community. The Vision Brief acknowledges Kresge’s theme of participatory democracy and decision-making and proposes the physical design of Kresge might change in light of an evolution of implied needs.
There is potential to breathe new life into the original vision of Kresge. With the right support, funding and collaboration, the campus could envision a college continuing the values of the Kresge College designed by Charles Moore and founded by Provost Edgar. There could be a future with institutional support for innovation and creativity at the intersection of democracy, cooperatives, sustainable and ecologically sensitive design, and even new interdisciplinary programming for students and faculty. I believe there is value in seeing this current planning and design process as being within the scope of the philosophy of stewarded transformation. Therefore, living true to participation in democracy, future stages of this process should continue the community discussion.
While there is the possibility of an approximate 130 million dollars of funds from Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services that could be used for a portion of the project, this will not be enough to do a respectful renovation addressing housing and a range of other living-learning support spaces. Additionally, to my understanding these funds are not guaranteed. Public-Private Partnerships have emerged in recent months as a potential funding mechanism for a Kresge College Renovation or other new housing west of Heller Drive on-campus, which I assume are buildable sites near Family Student Housing, Porter College, and Kresge College. Public-Private Partnerships are when a private developer leases the public university land, develops, owns, and then manages the project. The developer would be the client for the project and make decisions about space allocation, resources, and how the project delivers return on investment.
I believe it is fair to ask about what a chosen funding strategy, or strategies, means for Kresge and UC Santa Cruz. It makes sense to consider a range of funding proposals before adopting one particular method. I believe at a minimum, the financial parameters used for determining a future Kresge should be sensitive to the fact that by involving Kresge and campus community in the process today, there is an investment in a future where a thriving alumni community makes an effort to seek out ways to contribute and give to the campus. I believe the question of how Kresge is funded is a meaningful conversation ultimately about how a future Kresge College and UC Santa Cruz will be stewarded by its community as it continues to grow and transform. It is an exciting conversation so imminent to the purpose of a participatory democracy.
The Kresge College Renovation is a remarkable opportunity for the campus community to create, fund, and support a refreshed Kresge College respectful of its heritage and values. The Kresge project brings together opportunities and challenges and raises questions with many variables. It is a project taking place amid a deteriorating site with broad cultural value, of increases in student population and the ethics of providing educational opportunities, of the various roles of private money in a public institution, and of designing and renovating buildings at an existing college as opposed to building on undeveloped land. It is a project, like the campus itself, whose ever-transforming, perpetual entanglement of many different elements and issues is worth so much more when they are cared for as parts to the whole.
UC Santa Cruz students, faculty, staff, and alumni have the opportunity to participate in the final Kresge College Renovation workshop with architects Studio Gang on Monday, October 24, 6–8pm at Kresge Town Hall. For more information about the project, please contact UC Santa Cruz Physical Planning & Construction.
