UCLA Graduate Catalog 1980-81 - Registrar - UCLA

looked like an ancient Roman
villa dug up at Herculaneum,
because they wanted to.
Even today the houses that
Nathanael West described in Day of
the Locust are to be found in the
Hollywood Hills. Bungalows in
the guise of miniature castles,
Swiss chalets, Tudor houses,
Chinese pagodas, Islamic mosques
- all constructed of two-by-fours
and plaster, and still lived in and
cherished by a new generation
who believe in make-believe and
aren't afraid to be different.
Since the whole city had somewhat
the look of a movie set, it is
not surprising that, back in the
middle 1920s, Westwood Village
was built in the Spanish colonial
style, and UCLA began its Westwood
campus on the adjoining
hills with four buildings in the
Romanesque style of medieval
Northern Italy. The place and the
climate were hospitable to any
architectural fancy.
Though high rise and contemporary
design have intruded on
these original conceptions, they
have not been obliterated, and
from one of the new towers to the
south of the village, on Wilshire
Boulevard, one looks down today
on what might loosely be described
as a Romanesque-modern Camelot.
Westwood is of course one of
the great learning centers of the
world, a city within a city, not only
emanating its intellectual energy
to the metropolis that surrounds
it, but also attracting and absorbing
the life and vitality of that
metropolis. In a sense, UCLA is the
heart and source of Los Angeles.
It is our well. Its shows, lectures
and concerts draw sellout crowds
from the general community, and
citizens who have no academic
connection with the University
will find excuses to enjoy its
beautiful trees, greens, walks and
gardens and mingle with its
beautiful people. The village, with
its cluster of first-run movie
theaters, its good small shops and
restaurants and its exhilarating
mix of students, faculty and
townspeople, has become the
most popular rendezvous and
walking place in Los Angeles.
Campus and village, in turn,
are enclosed like the pearl of an
oyster in a community of enormous
wealth, vitality and good
humor. In nearby Bel-Air, Pacific
Palisades and Beverly Hills, one
might drive for days without
passing a house worth less than
half a million dollars, and few
would be that cheap. They would
be English cottages, French
Chateaux, Spanish castles,
colonial mansions, Georgian
country houses, Egyptian temples
- side by side in a sort of
insouciant harmony. And living
in them, among the nabobs and
philistines, would be one of the
highest concentrations of creative
people in the world, living the
bountiful Los Angeles life with
their maids and Alfa Romeos and
swimming pools and Afghan
hounds and of course their
amusing hangups.
Critics have despised us in Los
Angeles as worshippers of money,
health, sex, surf and sun. Not
quite true. We don't worship those
things; we just rather get used to
them, since they happen to be so
available. We also love education,
music, the theater, football, auto
racing, ballet, skiing, tennis,
good food, good wine and casual
clothing, and we take them for
granted, because they are here,
along with our magnificent
beaches, from Laguna to Malibu,
our visible mountains, our nearby
deserts, our museums, our
galleries and our spring weather,
which comes in January and lasts
through November.
There is a visible Los Angeles.
It may be seen in some of the
most imaginative and beautiful
churches, shopping centers,
colleges and public buildings in
America, in our freeways, which
move traffic better than those of
any other large American city, and
are nothing less than works of art,
among the modern wonders of the
world; in our stadiums and palms
and eucalyptus trees and our lilac
foothills; in our mansions and our
houses with yards, in our boulevards
and marinas, and in our
"big dumb ocean," as an Eastern
critic once strangely described it.
But the Los Angeles that makes
us stay here, including the critics,
who rarely go home again after
their second visit, is invisible.
It is space, newness, openness,
tolerance, energy, optimism and
exuberance, and the probable
truth that, as Will Rogers said,
we are all a little bit cuckoo.
Besides all that, or because of
it, perhaps, Los Angeles is simply
the freest city in the world.
" lb be able to choose what you
want to be and how you want to
live," JanRowanwrote someyears
ago in Progressive Architecture,
"without worrying about social
censure, is obviously more
important to Angelenos than the
fact that do not have a Piazza
San Marco"
No Piazza San Marco? An oversight.
One of our cuckoo billionaires
will build one tomorrow.