Extreme Makeover at Pomona

Changes to Pomona College's campus included replacing a low wall with a series of welcoming terraces. See a slide show of the changes. (Photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

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By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Claremont, Calif.

To understand why Pomona College spent $9.7-million last year on an extreme makeover of a campus center that was only eight years old — a renovation that involved digging a huge hole in a lawn, moving the mailroom from one side of the building to the other, replacing furniture, and owning up to a number of miscalculations and mistakes — you'll need a little background.

In the early 1990s, Pomona began planning to replace a cramped, plain building that had served as its campus center for decades. It housed a game room and a student-run coffee shop called the Coop Fountain, and it connected to the beloved Edmunds Ballroom, which everyone agreed ought to be kept. Because the site was so prominent — just off the college's beautiful main quadrangle and directly across from a 1915 Spanish Renaissance auditorium called Bridges Hall of Music — the college sought out Robert A.M. Stern Architects, a top-tier firm known for producing classical designs. The firm was asked not only to design the new building but also to choose the furnishings.

After discussions that involved students, student-affairs administrators, and trustees, plans for a spare, elegant, neo-Classical complex came together. Centered on a spacious courtyard with two-story colonnades, the complex would be built of poured concrete, like a number of other Pomona buildings, and it would be ornamented with cast stone. Its various axes would line up with several campus thoroughfares, as well as with Bridges Hall of Music and with the ballroom. It would have a string of formal parlors facing the quadrangle, a high-end dining facility called the Sagehen Cafe, and a spacious and particularly lovely room for trustee meetings. The Coop would be filled with chic little metal cafe tables and would open onto the courtyard.

But when the plans were sent out for estimates, the college got an unwelcome surprise — the complex would cost a lot more than Pomona was prepared to spend. College officials sat down with the architects for not one but two rounds of cost cutting that eliminated a number of elements — irrigation for the courtyard, an art gallery, and a pub and most of the other basement features. Even so, the building ended up costing $18.3-million. It opened in 1999 to widespread praise — it was still a very handsome structure — and Pomona's students proceeded to ignore it. In droves.

At 65,000 square feet, it was big — at least for a 1,500-student college — and it was mostly empty. "We had a beautiful building," says Neil Gerard, the building's director, "but not a very functional campus center." To its credit, Pomona was quick to acknowledge that it had made some poor choices (The Chronicle, March 26, 2004).

Almost immediately the college started tweaking things. Sofas and booths replaced the chic little cafe tables in the Coop Fountain, and its white walls got painted red. Planters and flower boxes appeared around the courtyard. At a cost of $200,000, a stairway was cut through a concrete floor to link the second-floor game room to the Coop (the game room and the Coop had been side by side in the old building). Banners were hung in a big two-story space by one set of stairs. Still, students stayed away. The game room went almost unused. Students did take advantage of the tasteful parlors for studying, but basically once one student had claimed a parlor, no one else dared go in.

Finally the college took a deep breath and decided that little fixes weren't the answer — the Smith Campus Center needed a major overhaul. Another committee was appointed. Gerard says a trustee, A. Redmond Doms (known as Rusty), came to the first meeting with a message from the trustees — think big, and don't worry about the price tag.

This time Pomona hired SmithGroup. Mark McVay, a principal with the firm, remembers coming to tour the building and talk to students. They suggested visiting the Motley, a student hangout at Scripps College, whose campus is one block north of Pomona's. Instead of the hotel-room pastels and fussy window treatments of the Smith center's parlors, the Motley had what McVay calls "a speakeasy feel." What really impressed him, he says, was that "students were bringing hors d'oeuvres they made in toaster ovens in their rooms." The Motley was a place students had made their own.

The renovations that McVay's team and the college eventually agreed on have affected both the interior and the exterior of the Smith center. For starters, the game room has been brought downstairs and located in a bright, glassy addition to the Coop. Doors in the addition allow cross-campus traffic to come in one side of the Coop and go out the other, which wasn't possible before.

Everywhere on the first floor, new doors have been installed. Instead of alternating glass with broad panels of metal, the new doors are almost all glass, so it's much easier to see in and out. A skylight has been cut into the roof to brighten the two-story stair space in the middle of the building. In one of the most striking changes, the formal parlors have been replaced by a long, sofa-filled living room with a low ceiling, a fireplace, a flat-screen TV, computers for checking e-mail, and an orange wall illuminated from behind. At one end is, of all things, the college mailroom.

Adding the mailroom to the living room guarantees a steady stream of foot traffic, says Gerard, creating the kind of see-and-be-seen place that students enjoy. Despite having access to cellphones, e-mail, text messaging, and Facebook, he says, students visit the mailroom as often as ever. "Everything you can buy, and some stuff you shouldn't, is coming to the mailroom — that's how I found out about hookahs.com," Gerard jokes.

He admits that putting the mailroom so far from the loading dock "makes no sense operationally" — it's a long hike for a FedEx driver carrying, say, someone's skis. But, he says, "it's great for students."

The basement saw major changes in a space that was originally left unfinished — because of all the early cost cutting — and that later was carved into offices for faculty members displaced by other campus building projects. Now it's a pub with dry-laid stone walls, a four-keg beer cooler, pool tables, a plug-and-play sound system, a lighting grid, and bamboo floors (sustainability, which wasn't a big concern in the 1990s, is now important to students, McVay says). The feel isn't quite that of a speakeasy, but it's definitely relaxed. In what was perhaps the makeover's most extreme move, a spacious patio and amphitheater were dug into the lawn outside the new pub, so parties can flow out into the evening air. A new wheelchair-access ramp now zigzags up beneath a bridge that leads to the living room's outside door.

The main courtyard also saw major changes. Surrounded on three sides by colonnades, it originally had a low wall on the fourth side, which faces the college's main quadrangle. But McVay was eager to connect the building more closely to the landscape, so the low wall has been replaced by two broad terraces that spill gently down toward the quadrangle.

The terraces pick up a pattern inscribed in the courtyard's pavement — the middle terrace has big diamonds of pavement outlined by narrow bands of greenery (it's actually creeping thyme), while the lower terrace has big diamonds of grass outlined in pavement. Lampposts on either side of the terraces both define a wide, welcoming entry to the complex and make it possible to use the terraces for college functions at night.

Not all of the changes are big. For example, a coffee bar was added to the high-end Sagehen Cafe — a small change that nevertheless helps bring in foot traffic. And some parts of the building weren't changed at all. The high-ceilinged room in which the trustees meet, for instance, was off limits for renovation planners and remains locked most of the time, even though it's probably the building's most interesting space.

Despite its $9.7-million price tag, the renovation didn't solve all of the complex's problems. Gerard is still worried about the cast-stone ornament, which has chipped easily and worn badly. And now that students are using the building more heavily, they're also skateboarding through it in higher numbers and locking bikes to anything they can find, like wooden benches outside the living room. But Gerard would rather have problems like these than have no one in the place at all.

McVay says he admires how deftly Stern's firm dealt with some of the challenges with which it was originally presented. "He resolves some campus-plan issues really elegantly," McVay says of Stern. McVay also notes that a basement pub was among the elements of the Stern firm's original plan that were cut to save money. "If the college had ponied up the money we spent originally, Stern could've done this," he adds. McVay also says that SmithGroup had some advantages coming into the renovation. They knew what problems they needed to fix, for instance, and they could test possible solutions — like the new doors — and see what people thought of them.

Still, there's no question that the makeover has markedly improved — and enlivened — the Smith center. Stop for a cup of coffee on a nice afternoon, and you'll find a class meeting on one of the terraces. Walk past on a rainy evening, and you'll see students hanging out in the Coop, shooting pool. And the living room? It's now so popular, Mr. Gerard says, that when the building closes, "you have to kick people out."

Lawrence Biemiller is a senior writer at The Chronicle.