The Natural History of the UC Santa Cruz Campus by Martha T. Brown

Facades of buildings facing the trees are muted by being painted a dull brown color. For the college, Charles Moore and William Turnbull have designed a village street, one that is intimately defined by irregularly punctured false fronts of free-standing appearance and almost cardboard cut out feeling, of white painted stucco with accent planes of primary colors, where spaces are animated by social facilities and oriented to a sequence of plazas and gardens, all threaded, in what initially seems to be somewhat incongruously, through a redwood forest setting. 'In the late sixties, the Moore group, designing Kresge College for the University of California at Santa Cruz, developed a totally theatrical-like painted stucco environment almost dancing in and through the landscape. (Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism, 568).

These flimsy-looking, Pop-Hollywoodish forms are accented with bright, primary colors at strategic places, marking with 1960s irony as 'monuments' such functional banalities as a public telephone and laundromat.' -Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Paradoxically, Moore vividly evokes the picturesque vitality of the hill town by fronting the street façades with a varied series of stuccoed, trabeated screens, stairs, and 'arches'. 'The L-shaped layout rambles through a redwood forest, widening, narrowing, twisting along its central 'street' in his version of the 'Italian hill town'. (Twentieth Century Architecture: A Visual History, 310). All the buildings are 2-storeys and located along a pedestrian street route.' -Dennis Sharp. It was built to a tight budget and its architecture attempts to express a 'non-institutional' alternative type of college.

It is a residential college accommodating 650 students, of whom half live in. 'Kresge College is situated on the heavily wooded UC Santa Cruz campus overlooking Monterey Bay.

The Natural History of the UC Santa Cruz Campus by Martha T. Brown