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Royce Hall

Architects
Allison & Allison CO Architects
Year
1929
Style
Romanesque Revival
City
Los Angeles, CA
Royce Hall
Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Royce Hall is one of the four original buildings on UCLA's Westwood campus, designed by the Los Angeles firm of Allison & Allison—brothers James Edward and David Clark Allison—and completed in 1929. Built of brick and tile in the Lombard Romanesque style, it served as the university's main classroom building and has become the defining image of UCLA.

the building

Twin towers over the quad. Royce's twin-towered front, the campus's best-known landmark, makes an abstract reference to the towers of a famous Italian abbey, drawing on northern Italian Romanesque sources for its brick-and-tile detailing.

An auditorium built for speech. The 1,800-seat auditorium inside was designed for spoken acoustics, not music. Successive remodelings through 1982 transformed it into a regionally important concert hall and the university's main performing arts venue.

the style

Royce Hall's Lombard Romanesque style borrows round arches, brick-and-tile surfaces, and a twin-tower composition from medieval northern Italian churches and abbeys, giving the young UCLA campus an air of inherited academic gravity. The building is named for Josiah Royce, the California-born philosopher who took his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in 1875.

More on Romanesque Revival

the architect

Royce Hall's original design came from the Los Angeles firm of Allison & Allison—brothers James Edward Allison (1870-1955) and David Clark Allison (1881-1962)—with CO Architects also credited on the building's record.

significance

Royce Hall is regarded as the defining image of UCLA and remains the university's primary performing arts venue.

nearby

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