An Uncommon Place traces decisive moments in the early creation of UCSC’s built environment. The vision that shaped the campus linked an innovative educational project with an extraordinary physical site. Using oral histories, architectural plans and drawings, the exhibition illustrates paths taken and not taken in the first decades of campus development: decisions, constraints, and hopes. It celebrates the achievement of UCSC’s founding planners while analyzing the tensions and contradictions that were built into the campus. Through many subsequent transformations, the university that took shape on rugged, forested terrain atop a high hill remains a unique and inspiring place.
“Not the standard campus we have always known, not an automobile under every redwood—but a vast area in which to live and study. It must be magnificent in conception, daring and forthright in its architecture—but gentle be the hand it lays upon the land.”
- Thomas Church, Founding Landscape Architect, 1962
free and open to the public
parking $4
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