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May 18, 2009, 03:13 PM ET
UCLA's Plan to Renovate Pauley Pavilion Draws Complaints
UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion would get a new look during a makeover announced last week. (UCLA image)
Details of a plan to renovate the 44-year-old Pauley Pavilion — the legendary basketball venue at the University of California at Los Angeles — have proved so controversial that the architect Frank Gehry weighed in with a warning and the university sacked a longtime supporter as head of the project’s fund-raising committee, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
UCLA announced the $185-million renovation and an associated fund-raising campaign last week at a news conference in the pavilion, which was designed by the Los Angeles Modernist Welton Becket and opened in 1965. The renovation will be overseen by NBBJ. The university says the arena suffers from a deteriorating infrastructure, flawed circulation, substandard seating that is too far from the court, and inferior facilities for athletes. But the extent of possible improvements is limited by the building’s constrained site.
It was NBBJ’s plan for correcting the circulation problems that became a flash point, according to the Times. Richard Bergman, an alumnus who had recently helped raise $325-million for another campaign, was named head of a committee to seek donations for the project, but he wasn’t satisfied by the architecture firm’s plan to add concourses to help move people around. He sought advice from Mr. Gehry, a friend, as well as from an architect who had been involved with the project at an earlier stage, Michael Hallmark. Mr. Gehry wrote to UCLA’s president to express his concerns; Mr. Hallmark wrote an analysis concluding that the new design is convoluted. “I would be shocked if you didn’t get 10 sports architects to all render that viewpoint,” he told the Times. But when Mr. Bergman tried to call a meeting of the fund-raising committee to discuss the renovation, the university nixed the plan and removed Mr. Bergman from the committee.
The university is eager to move ahead with the renovation, officials told the Times. “I feel confident that we’ve done a good job of addressing the issues that can be addressed,” said Steven A. Olsen, the university’s vice chancellor of finance, budget, and capital programs.
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