Knitting together an urban campus

July 2010 —Loyola Marymount University (LMU) sought to unite the two separate areas of a Los Angeles campus through the development of a key hinge site. AECOM provided masterplanning, architecture and landscape architecture for the new William H. Hannon Library, which is targeting a LEED Gold certification and has been named one of 10 standout buildings in new American architecture by CNN. Architect Paul Danna and Landscape Architect Alma Du Solier discuss the project from their respective viewpoints.

Site

Paul: The site was the single greatest influence on the design. The form, materials and even the internal organization of the library were all strongly influenced by the location our team was given to design for. Previously, a barren open space between the residential and academic campuses, this piece of land had always divided the LMU campus into two distinct areas. It also occupies a unique position on the bluff that forms one edge of the LMU campus and looks out over the LA basin below. Working with Alma and her team gave us the ability to capitalize on the site's unique location by linking the previously unconnected campus areas, creating a seamless pedestrian experience and new open spaces, and realizing a new landmark for LMU as viewed from the city below.

Alma: The historic main campus is dominated by the Art Deco Mediterranean architecture of its chapel and main buildings. In contrast, the Leavey + Hughes Campus consists of modern mega structures carved into the slope below the plateau. The new library building sits at the hinge-point where new meets old, slope meets plateau and the campus axes shift from east/west to north/south. The open space design was an opportunity to artfully integrate the two distinct campuses, in terms of program, circulation and design language, unifying the campus overall while establishing a forward-looking shift in landscape quality and language.

Institutional mission

Paul: Among the institutional goals of LMU are to help their students grow intellectually, socially and as members of their community. The new library assists in each of these areas: intellectually, through the physical, technological and human resources that it makes available to its students; socially, through its internal and external spaces that support group study and learning, socializing, formal meetings and chance encounters. For the LMU community, including the neighboring residents who enjoy the use of the new facility, the library has become a new focal point bringing the university's diverse community together to learn, to share and to interact in a way that has not happened before on the campus. Alma and her team amplified the success of the architecture in this regard by creating useable open spaces that benefit the LMU community on a daily basis and also have the ability to accommodate special events in the life of the university.

Alma: The landscape design sought to protect and enhance the existing ceremonial spaces on campus, to use the existing landscapes of trees and lawn as a guide to future landscape design and to protect and enhance views to the Los Angeles Basin. An existing alley of palms is extended to terminate at the library entry, thus linking the new building directly into the heart of the Main Campus. Because the building is such a pure form (an almost perfect cylinder and a cube), merging the landscape around it with the cues given by adjacent portions of campus was key. The simplicity of form found in the landscape complements and grounds the building. At the same time, this subtle grading exercise had to be able to accommodate specific programs; for example, the larger landform houses two amphitheater-like spaces, one with more formal concrete seating, the other a simple, sloping lawn oriented toward the expansive panorama from the bluff to the ocean and Los Angeles' western skyline.

Aesthetics and functionality

Paul: The aesthetics of the new library are not applied, but grow out of issues of function, performance and architectural rigor. LMU's goal, as well as ours, was to create one of the first libraries of the 21st century—not one of the last of the 20th. The library of the past was inward looking, formal, focused on the individual and solitary study. The William H. Hannon Library is the opposite: open, communal, supportive of the individual and groups, a multi-purpose social center as well as a high-performance learning facility. Architectural elements such as the vertical wood louvers achieve these goals while at the same time giving the building its character and relating it to surrounding structures in a complementary way. More than any architectural gesture, it's the landscape design that binds the library to its surroundings while also offering amenities and benefits beyond the scope of the library of the past.

Alma: Much of the aesthetic in the Library Plaza landscape came from turning functional elements into design features. Bike racks form a line that reads as a sculpture when bikes are not present, avoiding the typical problem of having a "parking lot" feeling in front of the building. To eliminate "dimples" created by area drains in the west plaza, we designed a single trench drain. This way, the drain becomes a design element, part of the overlook composition, instead of meaningless drains throughout the site. An ADA ramp at the Library's entry is integral to the east-west promenade and the amphitheatre area, allowing it to be an element of the composition, not an "added" element. Custom, exposed, aggregate paving with saw cut joints and hidden expansion joints provide a clear and elegant paving palette, one consistent with the concrete prevalent on campus, but made more special. The exposed aggregate selected is compatible with the stone cladding used for the building.

Environmental performance

Paul: Environmental performance was incorporated at all levels of the project, from decisions regarding the planning of the library to the choice and integration of engineering systems. The mass of the building was kept compact to allow for more open space on the site and to maximize the building's energy performance by minimizing its exterior surface-to-floor-area ratio. The circular form of the library's public spaces also minimized the amount of building exterior needed to enclose the required program area—minimizing its environmental impact by minimizing its use of new materials. The building mass was then carefully perforated with windows and skylights to capture the day-lighting benefits of natural light while perimeter setbacks and solar screens protect against solar heat gain and the negative long-term impact of the sun on the library's books, helping to preserve these valuable and often-cherished resources.

Alma: The program requirement for a multi-use lawn area to hold about 3,000 students during Convocation, and the extension of the existing palm alley (not a native tree) into the site to some degree limited our ability to push the limits of sustainability; however the remainder of the planting palette is comprised of native and drought-tolerant species. The team introduced the native grasses as a new campus standard, which has since been adopted in other parts of campus. Native grasses have come to replace the dominant lawn type and use of exotics on campus in some other small projects that the university has recently built. In addition, the fill for the amphitheater landform is from the building excavation, limiting the movement of material off site. Since we couldn't make it "the most sustainable landscape in the world," we focused on using the library landscape design to create a lasting influence in the larger campus and set the tone for the open space evolution at LMU. Over time, the precedents set by both landscape and building should allow the university to save water, energy and resources, and to influence future generations to do the same.

Jake Herson