Royce Hall
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| Address | 340 Royce Drive Los Angeles, California United States |
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| Coordinates | 34°4′22″N 118°26′31″W / 34.07278°N 118.44194°WCoordinates: 34°4′22″N 118°26′31″W / 34.07278°N 118.44194°W |
| Owner | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Operator | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Type | Performing arts center |
| Capacity | 1,800 |
| Construction | |
| Opened | 1929 |
| Architect | Allison & Allison |
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Royce Hall is a building on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Originally designed by the Los Angeles firm of Allison & Allison (James Edward Allison, 1870-1955, and his brother David Clark Allison, 1881-1962) and completed in 1929, it is one of the four original buildings on UCLA's Westwood campus and has come to be the defining image of the university. The brick and tile building is in the Lombard Romanesque style, and once functioned as the main classroom facility of the university and symbolized its academic and cultural aspirations. Today, the twin-towered front remains the best known UCLA landmark. The 1800-seat auditorium was designed for speech acoustics and not for music; by 1982 it emerged from successive remodelings as a regionally important concert hall and main performing arts facility of the university.
Named after Josiah Royce, a California-born philosopher who received his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in 1875, the building's exterior is composed of elements borrowed from numerous northern Italian sources. While very different in their composition and near-symmetry, the two towers of Royce make an abstract reference to those of the famous Abbey Church of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan.
Severely damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Royce Hall underwent a $70.5 million seismic renovation designed by Barton Phelps & Associates (Barton Phelps, FAIA, 1946 -) and Anshen + Allen Los Angeles and completed in 1998. This program of extensive structural strengthening, functional improvements, and conservation work essentially inserted a new building within the old. The towers verged on collapse and were strengthened and restored on an emergency basis. The project for the rest of the 200,000 square foot building accommodated a new structural system of six-story, concrete shear panels located around the "big box" of the auditorium and connected by concrete beams to the building's historic exterior brickwork. Royce Hall's eligibility for National Register listing prompted FEMA earthquake resistance requirements beyond normal life / safety levels and triggered close design scrutiny by federal and state preservation officers. The new "soft" structure responds in unison with original masonry infill panels to provide sufficient lateral resistance to protect the building's historic fabric from damage.
The sidewalls of the auditorium were reconfigured to hold foot-thick concrete shear panels the volume of which could have lessened its reverberant character. New wall openings, cut into abandoned rooftop areaways, are enclosed by new structure to form operable acoustic galleries allow variable acoustic responses. Along with new ceiling coves, the galleries increase the volume of the hall by 40,000 cubic feet and lengthen its reverberation period by over a second at their maximum setting. Skylights in the gallery restore natural light to the spectacular coffered ceiling, now for the first time, brightly illuminated. Unlike the former plaster interior, the new walls are clad in brick and terra cotta identical to that on the original exterior of the building. The uneven texture of projecting blocks improves sound diffusion. Its pattern is abstracted from Lombard Romanesque motifs in Lucca and other cities in the valley of the Po River in northern Italy.
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