UCLA & Westwood
Royce Hall's Romanesque arches, a 17-storey federal tower, and the old soldiers' home the city grew around.
Key facts
- Royce Hall, the signature building of UCLA, opened in 1929, designed by Allison & Allison in a Lombard Romanesque (Romanesque Revival) style modeled on the church of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan.
- The Wilshire Federal Building, the big tower just east of the freeway at Wilshire & Sepulveda, is 17 stories / 261 ft, completed in 1969.
- The West Los Angeles VA grounds beside the freeway trace to the 1887–88 Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers; the adjacent Los Angeles National Cemetery was dedicated in 1889.
Narration transcript
Everything interesting on this stretch is to your left, to the east. That's Westwood, and behind it the campus of UCLA — and the building to look for in your mind's eye is Royce Hall, the university's great front door. It opened in 1929, a warm brick pile of Romanesque arches, and its architects copied it almost directly from an ancient church in Milan — so there's a little piece of medieval Italy anchoring a California public university.
Closer to the freeway, that tall plain slab is the Wilshire Federal Building — seventeen stories, finished in 1969, the local face of the U.S. government and, for decades, a magnet for every protest march in West LA.
But the oldest story here is the green land right along the freeway: the West Los Angeles veterans' grounds. Long before the campus, before Westwood, before this freeway existed, this was a soldiers' home — opened in the 1880s for disabled Union veterans — and the national cemetery beside it, with its long white rows, was dedicated in 1889. The city grew up around the old soldiers, not the other way round.