IRVINE – The University of California Irvine tore down a building designed by world famous architect Frank Gehry, saying a larger building was needed for a growing campus population.
Gehry, who designed the metal-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, created a boxy, two-story building in the 1980s using stucco, galvanized metal, chain link and other cheap materials.
University officials said it was never intended to be permanent and was falling apart.
Despite a protest from about 100 faculty members, the building and an adjacent one by architect Rebecca Binder were demolished over the weekend to make way for a six-story, 180,000-square-foot engineering building.
“They served a function. They did it well. They were actually great, wild and funky” but a bigger building was needed, campus architect Rebekah Gladson said.
“We are going to grow to over 30,000 students, and we are going to have to take down some of these interim fixes,” she said.
Architecture and art history experts condemned the razing.
Sarah Whiting, an architectural historian at Princeton University, said Gehry has designed buildings for major universities, including MIT, Harvard and Princeton.
“Every campus has a Gehry building,” she said. “UCI will be the only one that has torn its down.”
