Plastic arts - design for fine arts building, University of California, Riverside

Architectural Review, The, April, 1995 by Raymund Ryan

The work of Frank Israel has always been about placement, about strategies of site manufacture and the careful intervention of specific elements. With partners Annie Chu and Barbara Callas, Israel is collaborating with Boora Architects of Portland, Oregon to construct the Surge Building, an interdisciplinary and hopefully experimental School of Fine Arts at the University of California, Riverside. This shift, from back lot to Edge City, from the almost domestic to the almost infrastructural, demands that Israel's own practice itself become more interdisciplinary and flexible without reneging upon its typically investigative architectural play.

To the question: 'what might an experimental institution look like in the early twenty-first century?', Israel answers with a kind of tectonic mound, rearing and folding in a terrain of asphalt and watered lawns. To the question: 'how should an experimental institution be?', Israel Callas Chu propose a chain of sheltered spaces, individuated within a primary topographic form and opening about a re-presentation of the traditional village square. The grand gesture contains a multiplicity, its innards are not so much filled up as lightly arrayed as an analogous urbanism.

Route 60 runs out of LA heading for San Bernardino and the Arizona desert. At UC, Riverside, the campus leads away from this isolated artery of cars with a typically orthogonal grid of faculty and leisure facilities. When completed (construction starts this summer), the Surge Building will mark the entrance to the university both in terms of general terrain and the perception of passing motorists. It will also be different from all neighbouring structures. Taking cues from the adjacent arroyo - a usually dry river bed from which the city rather optimistically takes its name - the Surge Building starts as the inverse of the valley, erupting into view to be eroded by paths and light traps and metaphorical boulders as Israel's design adapts its initial massiveness to the organic patterns of its users.

With such an expanse of tilting roofs, one is curious to know which materials are selected to wrap the form. How might the edges be dealt with? The team's expectation is for zinc wherever possible, certainly in those easily viewed planes alongside the access road and around the communal yard. Other walls will be of specifically coloured stucco or brick - the texture of suburban sprawl - suggesting a morphology of supplement and camouflage vis-a-vis both nature and the generic building tradition. How then to puncture these sculptural surfaces for the necessary openings? Israel's approach has been to express abstractly, as plastic voids, incisions into the larger interior volumes (studios, a recital hall) about the focal court while allotting individual windows with apparent freedom around the remaining periphery.

On plan, the various constituent departments (art history, fine arts, theatre, film, music and dance) are cranked about, separated from and related to each other. There is no single grand interior: the school's ceremonial space is its east-facing shared yard. But the principal functional volumes frame and anchor the main moves. So the 350-seat recital hall and a zappy rehearsal studio embrace the court while pedestrian passages - gullies - from the south and from the car park to the west are bracketed by the main performance studio and painting lab and by lecture and screening rooms. Smaller rooms congregate between these knuckles with corridors as animated interstitial space.

Ostensibly, it's odd to see Deconstruction and Frank Lloyd Wright in the same project but the Surge Building has the fragmentation of the current scene - representative forms of a fragmented culture - with the organic place-making concerns of a post-agrarian democracy. There's a touch of Eisenman in the chopped gables and of Gehry in the collective dispersal, of Scharoun in the horizontal fenestration (the south facade is perhaps too designed) and of Aalto in the interlocking of internal and external form. But in the court you return to Wright and specifically Taliesin West across the desert at Scottsdale. Both architectures mould their sites with planters and steps and terraces. At Riverside, Peter Walker is to augment the habitat by growing aboriginal cacti and the formerly cultivated orange trees.