Kresge College Expansion Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Located in a redwood forest in northern California, Kresge College has been a bold experiment in student-driven education since 1971. Its original “hill town” campus by Charles Moore and William Turnbull created a bright, playful village within the forest, anchored by a winding pedestrian street, where students could practice participatory democracy and test out new ways for living and learning. Fifty years later, this expansion project aims to reinvigorate the Kresge campus as a vital, experimental environment for education. The construction of four new buildings—three residential halls and an academic center—restores the integrity and community spirit of the original design while opening up to embrace students of all abilities, the incredible natural ecology of its site, and the larger university community beyond. The new buildings engage Moore and Turnbull’s architecture in a dialogue that complements their rectilinear, angular language with a more organic one of curvature and porosity. The new buildings are sited and designed to minimize the removal of redwood trees by bending around important groves and nestling into the topography. The brightly colored residential buildings extend the pedestrian street’s social spaces with shared ground floor amenities where students can come together in an open and welcoming environment. The Academic Center negotiates a steep slope by employing a technique common to polypore fungi: simultaneously stepping down the slope and flaring out. This allows the building to stay in scale with its neighbors at the upper street level while bringing natural light and fresh air to the lower floors.